hey everyone, just a general question. I did an lspci on my home computer, and it got me thinking... When I hear pci..I think of the physical slots on your motherboard. usually beige in color.. But the list returned to me is of atleast 20 items. None of which, (besides the graphics card) is plugged into a pci slot... Some things like memory controller, 1,4,5, high definition audio, Address map, DRAM controller, and the most bizarre, Serial ATA Controller... So does this mean, that these devices built onto the motherboard are using the same PCI bus that have the two slots on my board? And why is a SATA controller using a PCI bus? And lastly, how many devices can all comfortably live on 1 bus? Or are all these different PCI buses?
Not necessarily the same PCI bus. Several independent buses are possible, and lspci will list all their contents. And it doesn't necessarily mean old-fashioned 1993-era PCI, PCI Express (and a ton of older things) all count as PCI too. But yes -- these devices have been hardwired in. Possibly right down at the chip level.
Why not? It doesn't necessarily mean vanilla, old-fashioned, 1993-era PCI. It could be PCI Express. And it's all probably wired into the silicon anyway.
That's more a matter of bandwidth than number of devices. Put a graphics card, gigabit network card, and other hard-driving stuff on the same bus and use them to their limit, they may compete for bandwidth. But if you have 10 USB cards, who cares.
Don't get offended at my suggestion, but you might want to invest in a book that describes how computer hardware works. The concept of a data bus is not new, and a book on the subject would give you a better understanding.
The bus does not need to have any physical slots. Laptops use PCI bus, and have no physical PCI slots. The slot is simply to allow expansion, to add new things onto the bus. Also there is PCI which is a parallel bus with shared bandwidth, and there is PCI-E, which is serial with dedicated bandwidth in a star topology. Lastly, yes a machine can have more than one bus. This is most common in servers, which need to support larger I/O workloads than a desktop.
None taken at all! I thank you for your response. The naming convention is what threw me.