Aug 07, 2017 That means that—potentially—any storage or disk drive, GPU or port expansion, or low-power gadget that uses a USB connection, could all be mounted on a card plugged into the M.2 slot at the same time. The reality is a little more complicated—for example, a single M.2 slot only has four PCI Express lanes, a quarter of the total generally. Devices might be plugged into the body of laptops via this slot. It allows devices like cellular broadband cards, memory cards, adapters, and network cards. Thunderbolt Port: Thunderbolt port is a connectivity medium, which uses expansion bus to let the laptop be connected to the peripheral devices. It has been developed by the tech giant Intel. A slot port vs sqaure port is the same thing, the only difference is the slot is Square ( all sides being equal ) vs slot rectangle ( unequal ) plus it has nothing to do with whether the walls of the enclosure are or are not used.
- Expansion Slots
- Expansion Slots Types
- Difference Between Ports And Slots
- Expansion Port Vs Expansion Slot
The Peripheral Component Interconnect or more commonly known as PCI is a standard for connecting a lot of devices inside your computer to extend its capabilities. Devices like sound cards, modems, NIC, TV Tuners, and some video cards have at some point or another have used the PCI port. The latest version of PCI known as PCI express is a much improved version in terms of speed.
PCIe uses a serial interface instead of the old parallel interface used by PCI. It also utilizes individual buses for each of the devices connected to it instead of a shared one like what PCI uses. The difference in speed is quite huge when comparing the standard PCI slot which runs at 133MB/s to a 16 slot PCIe that can send or receive up to 16GB/s.
The most common use for PCIe nowadays is with graphics cards which benefits hugely from the huge bandwidth provided by the interface. PCIe has totally replaced another standard called AGP which was specifically intended for graphics cards.
PCIe wasn’t intended to run at full speed for all devices since most devices don’t really need that much to operate properly. Speeds are categorized by lanes, each with its own transmit and receive lines. Each lane can provide up to a maximum of 1GB/s, thus giving the 16 lane slot the maximum 16GB/s, slower devices are categorized by the number of lanes they use from 1 to 16.
Unlike PCI slots which are the same size for all devices, PCIe slots can differ depending on which form factor it accepts. The longest would be the 16 lane slot and understandably, the shortest is for the x1 devices. Although there are slots that accept multiple form factors but only operate at a lower speed. This is done in order to allow the use of bigger cards in what would otherwise be a smaller slot. Even if the speed doesn’t necessarily match up to what is required, it allows the user a little bit more flexibility in terms of what he can plug into his machine.
Although PCIe is generally superior compared to PCI, there is still a lot of devices that are being made for the PCI slot, due in part to the simplicity of PCI and to the fact that most devices do not really need the significant speed advantage.
Summary:
1. PCIe is much faster compared to PCI.
2. PCIe uses a serial interface while PCI uses a parallel interface.
3. PCIe speed is classified into lanes, each capable of delivering up to 1GB/s data transfer.
4. PCI slots are standardized while PCIe slots vary depending on the number of lanes the slot is intended for.
5. Despite PCIe superiority, most manufacturers still use the PCI standard for their devices.
Ben Joan
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Expansion Slots
Communications and networking riser (CNR) is a slot found on certain PC motherboards and used for specialized networking, audio, and telephony equipment. A motherboard manufacturer can choose to provide audio, networking, or modem functionality in any combination on a CNR card. CNR slots were once commonly found on Pentium 4-class motherboards, but have since been phased out in favor of on-board or embedded components.
Technology[edit]
Physically, a CNR slot has two rows of 30 pins, with two possible pin configurations: Type A and Type B, each with different pin assignments. CNR Type A uses 8-pin PHY interface, while Type B uses 17-pin media-independent interface (MII) bus LAN interface. Both types carry USB and AC'97 signals.
As with AMR, CNR had the cost savings potential for manufacturers by removing analog I/O components from the motherboard. This allowed the manufacturer to only certify with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the CNR card, and not the entire motherboard. This resulted in a quicker production-to-market time for new motherboards, and allowed mass-production of CNR cards to be used on multiple motherboards.
The ACR slot was a competing specification developed by a group of third-party vendors. Its principal advantage over CNR was the backwards-compatible slot layout which allowed it to use both AMR and ACR cards. The same group also developed a physically smaller version, the MDC.
History[edit]
Intel developed the CNR slot to replace its own audio/modem riser (AMR) technology, drawing on two distinct advantages over the AMR slot it replaced; CNR was both capable of being either software based (CPU-controlled) or hardware accelerated (dedicated ASIC), and was plug-and-play compatible. On some motherboards, a CNR slot replaced the last PCI slot, but most motherboard manufacturers engineered boards which allow the CNR and last PCI slot to share the same space.
With the integration of components such as ethernet and audio into the motherboard, the CNR is obsolete, and is not found on PC motherboards anymore.
Expansion Slots Types
See also[edit]
- Advanced Communications Riser (ACR)
- Audio/modem riser (AMR)
- Mobile daughter card (MDC)