PCI

[ßracius]

I was wondering, Does the CPU or BIOS see the PCI slots or do they just get the info from the PCI controller?

[Geek #1]

Oh, good one, why do you ask??

The PCI slots (along with ISA/AGP and USB's) are connected to the motherboard bus via the Southbridge chip (part of the Chipset on the motherboard.)

The bus also connects to the RAM and CPU (Via the Northbridge chip.) So indirectly, yes the CPU does see the PCI slots.

Further information about this can be found at:
http://www.mkdata.dk/click/ http://www.pcguide.com/topic.html

[ßracius]

Yeah, I was looking and I see that the PCI slots are using the PCI controller and the ISA/AGP slots are on the PCI Bridge. I got to thinking "Why would you need to use a controller if the "system" sees the PCI directly, but then I got to thinking "the interrupt channels need to be config'ed" so I was just wondering if the "system" just sees the PCI controller and accepts the data from the north bridge and then it converts and sends to the slots or if the "system" and the north bridge work in tandem?

[ßracius]

Originally posted by Bracius:
Yeah, I was looking and I see that the PCI slots are using the PCI controller and the ISA/AGP slots are on the PCI Bridge

ACK! Sorry that's wrong, the AGP slot belongs under the PCI controller not the PCI bridge. Sorry about that, wasn't thinking.