PCIe
PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard used to connect hardware devices like graphics cards, SSDs, and network cards to a computer's motherboard. It replaces older parallel bus standards like PCI and AGP by using point-to-point serial links, providing significantly higher bandwidth and scalability. PCIe is fundamental in modern computing for enabling fast data transfer between the CPU and peripheral components.
Developers should learn PCIe when working on hardware-accelerated computing, embedded systems, or performance-critical applications like gaming, AI, and data centers, as it directly impacts device communication speed and system performance. Understanding PCIe is essential for optimizing hardware configurations, debugging device compatibility issues, and designing systems that leverage high-speed peripherals such as GPUs for machine learning or NVMe SSDs for storage.