The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Local bus

The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Local bus was designed as a high bandwidth bus that provides a data path between the CPU and multiple high performance peripherals.

PCI is still used for certain specialized cards, although many tasks traditionally performed by expansion cards may now be performed equally well by USB devices.

The PCI standards include a full plug-and-play capability. This means the computer BIOS or operating system can determine the resource requirements (memory, I/O, or interrupt) of such cards automatically and assign resources in a way that there are no conflicts with other cards.