The correct answer is: C. 16 bit & 32 bit
IBM’s Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) is a bus architecture developed by IBM for its PS/2 line of personal computers. It was introduced in 1987 as a replacement for the ISA bus. MCA is a 32-bit bus, but it can also support 16-bit devices.
MCA was designed to be a high-performance, expandable bus architecture. It supports up to 32 devices on a single bus, and it has a maximum data transfer rate of 16 megabytes per second. MCA also supports a number of features that were not available on ISA, such as hot-pluggable devices and bus mastering.
MCA was not widely adopted, however, due to its high cost and the fact that it was proprietary to IBM. In the early 1990s, the PCI bus emerged as a more popular alternative to MCA. PCI is an open standard bus architecture that is supported by a wide range of manufacturers.
Despite its limited adoption, MCA was a significant development in the history of personal computer bus architectures. It was one of the first high-performance, expandable bus architectures, and it introduced a number of features that are now standard on modern bus architectures.
Here is a brief explanation of each option:
- Option A: 8 bit & 16 bit. This is incorrect because MCA is a 32-bit bus.
- Option B: 16 bit & 24 bit. This is incorrect because MCA does not support 24-bit devices.
- Option C: 16 bit & 32 bit. This is the correct answer because MCA supports both 16-bit and 32-bit devices.
- Option D: 32 bit & 64 bit. This is incorrect because MCA is a 32-bit bus.
- Option E: None of the above. This is incorrect because MCA supports both 16-bit and 32-bit devices.