There are many recent technologies that have signalled a shift in the way data is sent within a desktop computer in order to increase speed and efficiency. Universal Serial Bus (USB), Serial ATA, and RDRAM, are all examples of moving away from a parallel architecture to a high-speed serial format, designed to ensure maximum bandwidth and provide future scalability.

The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Bus has been widely used as a general purpose I/O interconnect standard over the last ten years, but is really beginning to hit the limits of its capabilities. Extensions to the PCI standards, such as 64-bit slots and clock speeds of 66MHz or 100MHz, are too costly, and just cannot meet the rapidly increasing bandwidth demands in PCs over the next few years.