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The Buses that you are most likely to run into on a day-to-day basis include the PCI (or Peripheral Component Interconnect) Bus and the AGP Bus (the Accelerated Graphics Port Bus). So let's take a look at the PCI Bus first. The PCI Bus has become the standard on almost all Pentium computers; most computers provide the slots for PCI. Some still provide the ISA slots, but almost all computers provide PCI slots. It's developed with open standards so there is no license. It provides for Hot Swap capability. In other words PCI slots can be arranged so that we can quickly pull a card out of the slot and put another one in. We will talk more about Hot Swap later on in this training. But PCI provides for that Hot Swap capability. This is extremely important when we talk about fault tolerance in regards to Servers. PCI also provides plug and play compatibility: all PCI buses are plug and play compatible. Some of the newer ISA buses are also plug and play compatible. The earlier ones were not, but all PCI are plug and play compatible. Which means that we can install a device in the computer and restart the computer, and the computer will recognize that there is now a new device that was not there the last time it was started. And it will attempt to give it the resources that it needs, such as the IRQ DMA channel, baseIO port and so on. Another thing about PCI buses is that they are continuing to evolve: speeds are continuing to increase. So PCI will probably be a bus that will be around for quite a while, because the speeds are continuing to increase within the same bus. We will talk later about some more advanced buses that are coming out, but we can expect to see our PCI buses in our servers and on our boards for some time to come. The VESA Local bus was replaced by the Accelerated Graphics Port Bus. And Accelerated Graphics Port Bus was designed by Intel and is used mostly for high-speed workstations that work with video driven applications like CAD: Computer Aided Design. But AGP can be used whenever we require a tremendous amount of video capability. If we are playing a game that requires a tremendous amount of capability, or if we are playing DVDs, there are many different instances in which AGP can be a tremendous help, because it is an extremely efficient bus that was developed specifically for video. So these are the buses that we are likely to see, and that we are likely to see if we open up the computers that we use today. Let's take a look at some buses that we are likely to see in the future. The Intelligent Input/Output or I2O bus is a bus that works along with PCI bus, and it uses special input and output drivers to think for itself - thus it frees up other Server resources. So this is just an enhanced version of a PCI bus, or a helper of a PCI bus that we are likely to see more of in the future. And then maybe eventually the PCI bus will be replaced by the InfiniBand Architecture or IBA bus, which is a high-speed high-output bus that is being developed today. So these are the buses that are in development to help us to transfer information very quickly around our computers and around our networks. But if we are going to be able to transfer information, then we must have a place to store it so that the processor can use it - and that's memory. And we will discuss memory in our next section.