PCI

/ˌpiː-siː-ˈaɪ/

n. “The standard expansion bus that connected peripherals before PCIe.”

PCI, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect, is a local computer bus standard introduced in the early 1990s that allowed expansion cards, such as network adapters, sound cards, and graphics cards, to connect directly to a computer’s motherboard. It provided a shared parallel interface for data transfer between the CPU and peripheral devices.

Key characteristics of PCI include:

AGP

/ˌeɪ-dʒiː-ˈpiː/

n. “The dedicated graphics highway of early PCs.”

AGP, short for Accelerated Graphics Port, is a high-speed point-to-point channel introduced in 1997 for connecting graphics cards to a computer’s motherboard. It was designed specifically to improve the performance of 3D graphics by providing a direct pathway between the GPU and system memory, bypassing the slower shared PCI bus.

Key characteristics of AGP include:

Peripheral Component Interconnect Express

/ˌpiː-siː-aɪ-iː/

n. “The high-speed lane that connects your computer’s components.”

PCIe, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, is a high-speed interface standard used to connect expansion cards (such as graphics cards, NVMe SSDs, network cards) directly to a computer’s motherboard. It replaced older PCI and AGP standards by providing faster data transfer rates, lower latency, and scalable lanes for bandwidth-intensive components.

Key characteristics of PCIe include: