Topic summary
Conventional PCI
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Peripheral Component Interconnect.
PCI and PCI-X are sometimes referred to as either Parallel PCI or Conventional PCI to distinguish them technologically from their more recent successor PCI Express, which adopted a serial, lane-based architecture. PCI's heyday in the desktop computer market was approximately 1995 to 2005. PCI and PCI-X have become obsolete for most purposes and have largely disappeared from many other modern motherboards since 2013; however they are still common on some modern desktops as of 2020 for the purposes of backward compatibility and the relative low cost to produce. Another common modern application of parallel PCI is in industrial PCs, where many specialized expansion cards, used here, never transitioned to PCI Express, just as some ISA cards never transitioned to PCI. Many kinds of devices formerly available on PCI expansion cards are now commonly integrated onto motherboards or available in USB and PCI Express versions.