A new technology for connecting PCs to peripherals and other computers will bear fruit in 2004, but it won't conquer the industry overnight.
Intel is among the strongest backers of PCI Express, a successor to the PCI standard used to connect devices such as network adapters, chips and sound cards to one another inside PCs. Chips for building PCI Express into computers will begin to come out at the end of the year, with complete PCs arriving in 2004.
The technology will greatly alleviate one of the oldest bottlenecks inside today's PCs. Currently, links based on PCI-X, the latest take on PCI technology, run at 133MHz in most computers. PCI Express will run at 2.5GHz and transfer far more data per second than the existing standards, according to the PCI-SIG, a neutral consortium sponsored by computing companies. Eventually, PCI Express could hit 40GHz.
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