A computer system optimized for real-time applications which provides increased performance over current computer architectures. The system includes a standard local system bus or expansion bus, such as the PCI bus, and may also include a dedicated real-time bus or multimedia bus. Various multimedia devices are coupled to one or more of the expansion bus and/or the multimedia bus. The computer system includes byte slicing and/or data packing logic coupled to one or more of the expansion bus and/or the multimedia bus which operates to allow different data streams to use different byte channels simultaneously. Thus the byte sliced bus allows different peripherals to share the bus simultaneously. The byte slicing logic thus may assign one data stream to a subset of the total byte lanes on the multimedia bus, and fill the unused byte lanes with another data stream. The data packing logic may optimally fill the bus with data having more or fewer bits than the bus. The computer system of the present invention thus provides much greater performance for real-time applications than prior systems.