The old, familiar PCI bus has quite a history. Introduced in mid-1993 to the high-end server and workstation market, it trickled down to the mainstream market in 1994 and has remained mostly unchanged in our desktop PCs for the past decade. Time has passed, however, and PCI’s meager 133MB/s data throughput across a single shared bus is not enough for current high-end systems with Gigabit LAN, Firewire and SATA RAID controllers.