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Standard Brewing For PC Card Replacement 'Newcard'
winston_pr writes "The details on the successor to the PC Card is starting to take form with details being given in this article at Nikkei Japan. The standard is scheduled to be finalized in 2003, while the first PCs with NEWCARD slots are expected to ship in the second half of 2004. Will this mean the end of all these crazy SD-card connection based peripherals?"
Yawn.
9 22 9&mode=thread&tid=137
a ne wcard.asp
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/21/202
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0302/03022103pcmci
I hope they avoid similar problems that plagued ISA / PCI motherboards.
As I recall there were a lot of timing issues with the PCI / ISA bridge which affected system performance.
Links:
PC Mag
Extreme Tech
The 'standard' is being built upon already established standards, specifically PCI express and USB 2.0. The connection interface will have to implement both, whereas the card itself will only have to implement one of the two.
The remainder of the standard has to do with tolerances for the connection interface, something that should be standardized to prevent rogue cards burning out your bus, or creating too much interference. They also deal with size and shape, as well as trying to standardize the exection mechanism (although this is only a suggestion at this point).
I can't speak for other laptop users, but the reason I like PCMCIA cards is that they provide an easy way to swap in and out components, fairly standard (way easier to find a PCMCIA modem then a firewire modem), and the integrated card is harder to break then a dongle, thus leading to the 'bulge' that you speak of for firewire, network, etc cards.
It would be nice (but I'm not expecting) for the new standard to give the PC Card Redux enough room where it can fit, say, an RJ-45 or two squeezed together USB or firewire ports without a dongle. Instead of a flat card like we have in PCMCIA or PC Card, it would be more of a square peggish looking card. OTOH, the flatter cardbus cards we have today are perfect for miniature hard drives, and memory sticks still aren't made in the largest size as the miniature hard drives.
As for myself with my old laptop, I'm going to check out the Xircom realport cards. :)
This is a great naming scheme! I hope whoever came up with this name in the Marketing dept. got a good raise...
NEWCARD 2 years later
NEWERCARD soon
NEWESTCARD and then
NEWERTHANTHENEWESTCARD after that
BRANDSPANKINNEWCARD a while later
SHINYNEWCARD eventually
NEWASCANBECARD
At least it is better than Fullspeed, Highspeed and Doublespeed.
-Adi Gadwale.
Features sell products... standards can help with uniform driver support. I completely agree with you about their practical benefit. This wouldn't influence me at all.
I purchased my Dell Inspiron 4150 in February of 2003. It only has one USB 1.1 port. It also does not have FireWire (I bought an SIIG FireWire PCCard)
Something to note on laptops with FireWire: For a lot of devices (like my ADS Pyro 1394 WebCam) you still need an external, powered hub. The laptop does not provide 12V of power to FireWire devices.
FireWire is _not_ a norm on laptops!