There are many recent technologies that have signalled a shift
in the way data is sent within a desktop computer in order to
increase speed and efficiency. Universal Serial Bus (USB),
Serial ATA, and RDRAM, are all examples of moving away from a
parallel architecture to a high-speed serial format, designed to
ensure maximum bandwidth and provide future scalability. The PCI
(Peripheral Component Interconnect) Bus has been widely used as
a general purpose I/O interconnect standard over the last ten
years, but is really beginning to hit the limits of its
capabilities. Extensions to the PCI standards, such as 64-bit
slots and clock speeds of 66MHz or 100MHz, are too costly, and
just cannot meet the rapidly increasing bandwidth demands in PCs
over the next few years. 3rd Generation IO, or 3GIO, has been
recently renamed PCI Express, and looks to be the replacement
for the ubiquitous PCI bus, the most successful peripheral
interconnect bus used in PCs. With support coming in the Intel
Grantsdale chipset, along with