The communication pathways between computer components

Observe that:   computer components are located apart from each other inside the computer:

To perform the computing task, the different components in the computer need to communicate with each other (using electrical signals)

The communication pathways between computer components

Computer components can transmit electrical signals to each other using the connecting wires on the motherboard:

Transmitting electrical data between computer components

Components in the computer are connected to each other using copper wires, a.k.a. a bus:

 
  • Bus (of a computer) = a group of electrical wires that are used to transmit similar information

  • System bus = all the wires inside a computer that are used to transmit information between components in the computer

The 3 buses inside a computer system

The wires are grouped into 3 categories by the type of information they carry:

 
  • Address bus = used to transmit the address of memory/IO device

  • Data bus = used to transmit data to/from memory/IO device

  • Control bus = used to transmit the command to memory/IO device

The system bus consists of the address bus, data bus and the control bus