What is buses

Typical PCs today run at speeds between 20 and 65Mhz. A bus transfers electrical signals from one place to another. Data travels between the CPU and memory along the data bus. The location address of that data is carried along the address bus. A clock signal which keeps everything in synch travels along the control bus. But since each task such as saving a file is made up of several programmed instructions, and each of those instructions takes several clock cycles to carry out, a person sometimes has to sit and wait for the computer to catch up.

Dinesh Thakur is a Freelance Writer who helps different clients from all over the globe. For any type of query or something that you think is missing, please feel free to Contact us. It is used to temporarily hold data and instructions that the processor is likely to reuse.

This allows for faster processing, as the processor does not have to wait for the data and instructions to be fetched from the RAM. The CPU contains a clock which, along with the CU, is used to coordinate all of the computer's components.

The clock sends out a regular electrical pulse which synchronises keeps in time all the components. The frequency of the pulses is known as clock speed. Clock speed is measured in hertz Hz. The greater the speed, the more instructions can be performed in any given moment of time.

Serial buses transmit data in bit-serial format. A bus was originally an electrical parallel structure with conductors connected with identical or similar CPU pins, such as a bit bus with 32 wires and 32 pins.

The earliest buses, often termed electrical power buses or bus bars, were wire collections that connected peripheral devices and memory, with one bus designated for peripheral devices and another bus for memory.

Each bus included separate instructions and distinct protocols and timing. Parallel bus standards include advanced technology attachment ATA or small computer system interface SCSI for printer or hard drive devices. Serial bus standards include universal serial bus USB , FireWire or serial ATA with a daisy-chain topology or hub design for devices, keyboards or modem devices.

System Bus: A parallel bus that simultaneously transfers data in 8-, , or bit channels and is the primary pathway between the CPU and memory. External Bus: Connects peripheral devices to the motherboard, such as scanners or disk drives.

Frontside Bus: Main computer bus that determines data transfer rate speed and is the primary data transfer path between the CPU, RAM and other motherboard devices. As it evolves, the bus can be discussed based on different engineering models. For example, there is the parallel bus and the serial bus, as mentioned above, and the different types of buses that you would encounter on the motherboard of a computer, for example, a system bus, address bus or input-output bus.

We can also talk about buses in the form of data transfer rates. For example, MHz is said to correspond to perhaps MB per second in some architectures. In general, the kinds of speed achieved by modern processors include bus speeds of typically under 10, MB or 10 GB per second.