Originally Posted By: tman
Just have to remember that PCI Express is the current bus and the abbreviation is PCIe. PCI-X was a server version of the old PCI bus and nothing to do with PCI Express.

It's really odd how the I/O slots on consumer PCs seemed to just stop for a while, then quickly catch up with PCIe. PCI had several iterations, going from 32 bit 33mhz slots (what most people think of as PCI), all the way to 64 bit 66mhz slots. PCI-X came along and bumped clock speeds even higher, all while maintaining backwards compatibility in most cases.

I suppose AGP probably had a lot to do with it. Graphics cards seem to be the main driver of better I/O slots in consumer machines, and when they left PCI for a bit, advancement there stopped. Servers and workstations on the other hand continued to push well beyond the 32bit/33mhz slots with things like gigabit ethernet, RAID cards and so on.