Industry Expert Blogs

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet”

How many times do you get Shakespeare in a tech blog? Well, here at ExpressYourself we like to cover all the bases (I’m fond of announcing that “I have a poetic license and I’m not afraid to use it!” much to the chagrin of my children I’m sure.)

Actually though, I’m going to take a slight issue with ole William on this one – because another of my sayings is that “Words have power!” By that I mean it’s important to be precise with language and actually use the correct words for things. It’s true then, that Humpty-Dumpty and I probably would not have gotten along terribly well…. “What does any of this have to do with PCI Express?” you may be asking by now.

Well, it seems like every PCI Express IP provider claims to have a “Root Complex” so let’s see what that really means. A Root Complex is the source of a PCI Express hierarchy. If you picture what I call an inverted tree, where the root is at the top, and the hierarchy fans out wider and wider as you go down, the Root Complex is the highest-up element on that tree. Another way to think of it is that a Root Complex contains the first piece of PCI Express logic encountered by a transaction from the system CPU.

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