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PCI Express - Coming Soon to a PC Near You
Max Romantschuk writes "I've been following the emerging of PCI Express for some time now. PCI Express, previously known as "Third Generation I/O" or "3GIO", is the technology set to replace PCI. PCI has been with us for around ten years now, and is rapidly running out of bandwidth. Last week Anandtech ran an interresting story on PCI Express. The techology has previously been covered by Hexus and ExtremeTech aswell. I feel this technology looks all set to replace PCI, and we really do need some new bus technology to keep up with the bandwidth demands of today's applications. Or is this just yet another way to force us into a new upgrade cycle?"
PCI-express is nothing other than Intel's favorite profit-making tool, version churn. there IS NO WIDESPREAD NEED FOR GREATER BANDWIDTH.
servers do not need PCI-express: they're already using PCI-X just fine, up to 1 GBps, which is plenty for any vaguely affordable IO devices. gosh, yes, it's tragic that 10G eth doesn't do so well on PCI-X, but when's the last time you saw a $40K 10GE nic at your local computer store?
AGP 8x is more than enough bandwidth for graphics - the obvious trend is towards greater intelligence and ram in the graphics card itself, which means you could probably put an ATI 9999-pro-xp on a fucking ISA bus and be happy.
the PC industry has talked itself into believing that there's an inevitability to the escalator that has allowed better hardware to trickle down to the desktop. introduce something at the high end and let the wonder of mass-production and human avarice bring it to even entry-level computers. why 150 MB/s SATA when disks are around 40, and there is by definition one disk per channel? why gigaflops on the graphics board of a business desktop that does everything in 2d?
switched fabrics are cool, though. the real figure of merit should be latency: PCI latency is the main concern for IO throughput today, and if it's not addressed in the next gen, it will have failed...
>= is not the same as ==, dumbass