You could make personal computers than ran a whole lot faster if only you weren’t constrained by the speed of the standard bus, and the concept of a high-speed internal local bus to connect the elements of the system and bypass the bus that is the face the machine presents to the outside world has been simmering for some time – Hewlett-Packard Co uses it in some of its latest Vectras. But the people that make the chip sets that support the microprocessor need a standard to design to, and Intel Corp has addressed the problem with the definition of a local bus that it calls Peripheral Component Interconnect – the peripherals in this case being peripheral chips rather than disk drives and such. The Peripheral Component Interconnect has a peak bandwidth of 132Mbytes-per-second, and Intel hopes that it will prove fast enough to satisfy several future generations of microprocessor. It is a multiplexed 31-bit address and 32-bit data bus, and is designed to connect graphics subsystems, networking controllers, multimedia co-processors, SCSI controllers and other fast peripheral chips to the CPU – and all can be on the motherboard. Described as a multiplexed 80486-like bus, it operates synchronously at up to 33MHz and the width can be doubled to 64 bits. Intel has rallied a vast army of the great and the good of the industry, IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Digital Equipment Corp, NCR Corp, NEC Corp, Dell Computer Corp, Adaptec Inc, Phoenix Technologies Ltd, VLSI Technology Inc and Tseng Labs Inc among them, to help it get the bus accepted as a standard.
