Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is a parallel expansion card standard, designed for attaching a video card to a computer system to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics. It was originally designed as a successor to PCI-type connections for video cards. Since 2004, AGP was progressively phased out in favor of PCI Express (PCIe), which is serial, as opposed to parallel; by mid-2008, PCI Express cards dominated the market and only a few AGP models were available, with GPU manufacturers and add-in board partners eventually dropping support for the interface in favor of PCI Express.
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that allows data exchange and delivery of power between many types of electronics. It specifies its architecture, in particular its physical interface, and communication protocols for data transfer and power delivery to and from hosts, such as personal computers, to and from peripheral devices, e.g. displays, keyboards, and mass storage devices, and to and from intermediate hubs, which multiply the number of a host's ports.
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU).
In computing, an expansion card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot on a computer's motherboard to add functionality to a computer system. Sometimes the design of the computer's case and motherboard involves placing most of these slots onto a separate, removable card. Typically such cards are referred to as a riser card in part because they project upward from the board and allow expansion cards to be placed above and parallel to the motherboard.
PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, capture cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
SATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.
A network interface controller is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.
Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a de facto standard for synchronous serial communication, used primarily in embedded systems for short-distance wired communication between integrated circuits.
On older personal computer motherboards, the southbridge is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset, handling many of a computer's input/output functions. The other component of the chipset is the northbridge, which generally handles high speed onboard communications.
The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a technical standard defined by Intel that specifies the register-level interface of Serial ATA (SATA) host controllers in a non-implementation-specific manner in its motherboard chipsets.
I/O Controller Hub (ICH) is a family of Intel southbridge microchips used to manage data communications between a CPU and a motherboard, specifically Intel chipsets based on the Intel Hub Architecture. It is designed to be paired with a second support chip known as a northbridge. As with any other southbridge, the ICH is used to connect and control peripheral devices.
Universal Serial Bus 3.0, marketed as SuperSpeed USB, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. It was released in November 2008. The USB 3.0 specification defined a new architecture and protocol, named SuperSpeed, which included a new lane for providing full-duplex data transfers that physically required five additional wires and pins, while also adding a new signal coding scheme, and preserving the USB 2.0 architecture and protocols and therefore keeping the original four pins and wires for the USB 2.0 backward-compatibility, resulting in nine wires in total and nine or ten pins at connector interfaces. The new transfer rate, marketed as SuperSpeed USB (SS), can transfer signals at up to 5 Gbit/s with raw data rate of 500 MB/s after encoding overhead, which is about 10 times faster than High-Speed. USB 3.0 Type-A and B connectors are usually blue, to distinguish them from USB 2.0 connectors, as recommended by the specification, and by the initials SS.
Thunderbolt is the brand name of a hardware interface for the connection of external peripherals to a computer. It was developed by Intel in collaboration with Apple. It was initially marketed under the name Light Peak, and first sold as part of an end-user product on 24 February 2011.
IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony and Panasonic. It is most commonly known by the name FireWire (Apple), though other brand names exist such as i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx.
A DMA attack is a type of side channel attack in computer security, in which an attacker can penetrate a computer or other device, by exploiting the presence of high-speed expansion ports that permit direct memory access (DMA).
The eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) is a technical specification that provides a detailed framework for the functioning of a computer's host controller for Universal Serial Bus (USB). Known alternately as the USB 3.0 host controller specification, xHCI is designed to be backward compatible, supporting a wide range of USB devices from older USB 1.x to the more recent USB 3.x versions.
SATA Express is a computer bus interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification. The SATA Express connector used on the host side is backward compatible with the standard SATA data connector, while it also provides two PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device.
Intel X99, codenamed "Wellsburg", is a Platform Controller Hub (PCH) designed and manufactured by Intel, targeted at the high-end desktop (HEDT) and enthusiast segments of the Intel product lineup. The X99 chipset supports both Intel Core i7 Extreme and Intel Xeon E5-16xx v3 and E5-26xx v3 processors, which belong to the Haswell-E and Haswell-EP variants of the Haswell microarchitecture, respectively. All supported processors use the LGA 2011-v3 socket.
Universal Serial Bus 4 (USB4), sometimes erroneously referred to as USB 4.0, is the most recent technical specification of the USB data communication standard. The USB Implementers Forum originally announced USB4 in 2019.
