PCI Master vs Slave - Motherboards - Motherboards. PCI master vs. PCI slave. Conventional PCI. Conventional PCI, often shortened to just PCI, is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer.
PCI is an initialism of Peripheral Component Interconnect and is [2] part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any particular processor's native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space.[3][page needed] It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock.
Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself (called a planar device in the PCI specification) or an expansion card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles, where it displaced the combination of several slow ISA slots and one fast VESA Local Bus slot as the bus configuration.