PCI EXPRESS

As of 2005, PCI Express appears to be well on its way to becoming the new backplane standard in personal computers. There are several explanations for this, but the principal reason is that it was designed to be completely transparent to software developers - an operating system designed for PCI can boot in a PCI Express system without any code modification. Other secondary reasons include its enhanced performance and strong brand recognition. Almost all of the high end graphics cards being released today from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA use PCI Express. NVIDIA uses the high-speed data transfer of PCIe for its newly developed Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology, which allows two graphics cards of the same chipset and model number to be run at the same time, allowing increased performance. ATI Technologies has also developed a dual-GPU system based on PCIe called Crossfire.

Most new Gigabit Ethernet chips and some 802.11 wireless chips also use PCI Express. Other hardware such as RAID controllers and network cards are also starting to make the switch. In 2005, Apple updated both the consumer iMac and workstation PowerMac to use PCI Express exclusively, hence supplanting the AGP and PCI-X connectivity that they had formerly utilized.

ExpressCard is just starting to emerge on laptops. The problem is many laptops only have one slot and it is difficult to give up the existing legacy Cardbus for the new ExpressCard slot. Desktops do not have this problem as they have multiple slots and can support PCI Express and the legacy PCI slots concurrently.