The word “bus” is also used for interconnect families that do not give all components a single shared electrical path. Intel's An Introduction to the Intel QuickPath Interconnect (January 2009, p. 8, “Interconnect Overview”) explicitly describes Intel QuickPath Interconnectasa point-to-point link despite the serial-bus terminology, and compares it with PCI Express. Here each link connects two endpoints. Independent links can carry traffic concurrently; traffic converging on one link or target still competes for that resource. The shared-bus timing example's single owner and serialized service must therefore not be assumed for a whole network of links merely because its interfaces are called buses. Serial versus parallel transfer and shared versus point-to-point topology are separate distinctions.
