(^50) PC Hardware: A Beginner’s Guide
CPU’s Bus System
Thebus,asitrelatestothepathwaysonthecomputerandintheprocessor,carriesthevar-
ious signals, addresses, and data (remember,datais plural) that are transferred around the
computer between its components. Although quite dissimilar, it can be related to the
routes of your local transit company in many ways.
On the computer, a bus structure is a group of electronic transmission lines that
connect the various components of the CPU, motherboard, and expansion cards to each
other. Bus structures have different sizes, ranging from 16 to 64 bits on modern micropro-
cessors, and their size determines the amount of data that can be transmitted. Obviously,
a 64-bit bus carries more data than a 16-bit bus.
Within the computer, there are several bus structures, as illustrated in Figure 3-4. The
most important of these are as follows: Data bus Carries information to and from the CPU.Figure 3-3. The components of the CPU