Q: Can you think of a solution that would enable faster devices to work at a more productive level? |
A: The easy solution would be to get all devices that can work fast, and put them on to another high speed bus, linked directly to the processor. |
In fact that is what they have done, they called this the Local bus. It is simply just another bus connected directly to the CPU. Devices which have high throughput(data transfer rates) can then work more productively.
Designing a Bus
If you were to increase the number of address lines, you would effectively
increase the number of memory locations you could address. If you increased
the number of data lines you would then be able to send more data bits
at a time, and if you increased the speed of the bus(clock speed) then
the more data transfers could take within a certain time.
Types of Bus
We have learned so far that in order for devices to be connected to the CPU they must be attached via a bus. When computers were first introduced they only had one bus, they were called single bus systems. These computers had all the devices attached to this single bus such as memory, graphics cards, IO(Input/Output) ports etc.
However today, the computer has multiple buses one for memory, expansion cards, high data transfer devices.
The two types of bus which I will introduce to you now are Expansion Bus and the Local Bus.
The Expansion buses main purpose is to allow
various types of devices to be connected to the CPU where as the Local
buses main purpose is to allow devices which require high data transfer
rates to benefit from almost direct connection to the CPU.