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Lesson Summary

The following points summarize the main elements of this lesson:

• Expansion buses provide a way of connecting devices to the motherboard.
• ISA architecture could accommodate both 8-bit and 16-bit expansion cards.
• MCA was a proprietary architecture for IBM's PS/2 computers.
• EISA 32-bit architecture could accommodate older ISA expansion cards.
• VLB employed burst mode and bus mastering to boost performance.
• PCI architecture makes use of autoconfiguration to let the PC's BIOS assign the IRQ linking the card to the system bus.
• AGP architecture removes display data traffic from the PCI bus.
• USB architecture supports both isochronous (time-dependent) and asynchronous (intermittent) data transfers.
• Expansion buses have changed to keep up with increases in processor speed.
• A computer technician must know how to identify the various expansion buses (ISA, MCA, EISA, PCI, AGP, and USB) to ensure compatibility and know how to maximize performance when upgrading a computer.

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