Question

Write any four feature of ISA and PCI Express.

Answer 1

Features of ISA: 1. The 8-bit ISA bus consists of a single card edge connector with 62 contacts. 2. The bus provides 8 data lines & 20 bit address lines. 3. The bus also supports connections for six interrupts and three DMA channels. 4. It runs at a speed of 4.77 MHz & has a transfer speed of 8MBps which makes it faster than serial ports, parallel ports, floppy controllers, keyboard controllers. 5. ISA supports 1 MB of memory.

Features of PCI Express: 1. PCI Express uses high speed serial signaling. 2. It is a switched design for point-to-point communication between devices. 3. It uses a packet-based system to exchange both data and commands. 4. PCI Express uses a four-wire interconnection system, two wires each (a balanced pair) for separate sending and receiving channels. 5. PCI Express allows multiple lanes within a single channel. 

Answer 2

ISA

1. Eight data lines.

2. Eight interrupt request levels.

3. 20 address lines.

4. Enables to handle 1MB of memory.

5. Supports 3-4 DMA (Direct Memory Access) channels.

PCI Express

1. Peripheral Component Inter connect (PCI) has 32 bit wide data.

2. It runs on 2.5GHz.

3. No priority queues.

4. Address / Data lines multiplexed.

5. Multi target, multi master

6. The maximum transfer rate is 16Gbps.