PCI EXPRESS

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards. PCIe has numerous improvements over the aforementioned bus standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance-scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism (Advanced Error Reporting (AER) [1]), and native hot-plug functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard support hardware I/O virtualization.
The PCIe electrical interface is also used in a variety of other standards, most notably ExpressCard, a laptop expansion card interface.
Format specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group), a group of more than 900 companies that also maintain the conventional PCI specifications. PCIe 3.0 is the latest standard for expansion cards that is in production and available on mainstream personal computers.