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Next-gen PCMCIA: Expresscard
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article at WindowsForDevices, the PCMCIA trade association rolled out version 1.0 of its next-generation standard for modular mobile and desktop computer expansion at this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, CA. Dubbed "ExpressCard", the new standard is "thinner, lighter, faster" than the group's previous PC Card standards, according to PCMCIA chairman Brad Saunders. ExpressCard achieves its space reduction by replacing the legacy parallel buses of the first and second generation PCMCIA card standards with state-of-the-art, high-speed serial connections, following a trend common in current computer system design."
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They should have just used a PCI-X bus with a goddamn CARDEDGE CONNECTOR. You can support 1x, or 16x as you like, but do away with those stupid pins. Alternately I could see using some high-speed form of firewire, which may be easier to implement, especially since you could have it run down to normal (400Mbps) 1394 speeds. And yes, I know about 800Mbps firewire, and that 1 and 1.6Gbps flavors are both on the horizon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ugh. Remember the first PCMCIA cards, specifically the modems and the NICs? Remember the horrible, easy-to-lose dongles, and the fragile and unreliable pop-out connectors? Remember how THEN double-height PCMCIA cards came into vogue, since they were actually big enough to fit on some real connectors? And now it's back to the teeny cards all over again. I can understand a small form factor for pocket PCs, but SD/SM/CF/whatever more than fill the niche for solid state storage, and CF also can do everything else, rather adroitly. And it isn't as though the digital road warriors among us are staggering under the weight of current PCMCIA cards, even the ones that are (HORROR!) big enough to stick an RJ-45 into. In conclusion, who the hell cares about form factor?
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
of course, there's the question of when you refer to PCMCIA if you're refering to the group, or the original memory card standard.
Now, as memory, yes, there are plenty of other standards, but there's the question of which one a computer manufacturer should standardize on -- portables put out by a company that also makes flash memory has a bias (ie, sony), but with an intermediary connection type, you can easily add additional capabilities to your computer, so that it can read the old legacy format that you're using in your digital camera.
And that's the key point -- adding additional capabilities. Not many people used PCMCIA [which as we all remember, means 'People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms'] for memory, but for modems, ethernet cards, SCSI connections, etc -- the sorts of things that a computer manufacturer decided the general public didn't need, but that you decided that you wanted.
With built-in modems commonplace, and there not being the whole X2/kFlex/kFlex/v.90 issues anymore, and no one's upgrading their internal 9600 baud modem, or getting a hardware based modem to replace their softmodem, modems aren't the key. And you don't need a 10bT or 100bT card to get on your LAN, as I haven't seen any new systems out there that didn't have 100 or better built in these days. Even wireless is starting to move to built in, and it's standardized, so most of 'em work together, or as reasonably as can be expected.
But that's the magic thing about PCMCIA, or whatever they want to call the slots this week -- we don't have to know what it's for. It's like the cigarette lighter in your car -- you can plug whatever the hell you want into it -- cell phone charger, power inverter, portable CD player, laptop, radar detector, hell, even a cigarette lighter. It's something that computer manufacturers can place into their systems to enable the consumer to have a choice of flexability.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
So what we have here are two cards of different widths, with a connector that's the same width. Here's what'll happen:
1) People will accidentally buy 54mm cards without realizing it won't fit in their 34mm slots
2) When you put a 34mm card in your 54 mm slot, your device will either have a big gap next to the card or will have to use an alkward and twice as expensive double door
3) The 22mm notch on the 54mm card will get caught on things and could possibly even be a weak point.
4) People won't realize that 34mm cards will work in their 54mm slot, or try to put it in on the wrong side, and such.
5) 5mm won't be thick enough for a variety of purposes
6) One of these card formats will be effectively abandoned (54mm) and the other will be widely adopted (34mm), obviating the work on the abandoned design and leaving a legacy of unsupported formats to confuse people on ebay auctions and such.
The logical thing to do would be what they do now: have single and double height cards, that work in a double slot.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
PC cards suck. Why make us suffer all of the complexities of supporting a new form factor when all it is is the mix of two interface types that should stand on their own?
What's wrong with plain ol' USB2.0? It seems to be a well-defined spec with LOTS of products on the market. It's fast enough for the most common applications used with laptops:
- Netwroking (Ethernet, Modem, Wireless)
- External Storage (Drives, CD/DVD, Flash)
- Input/output devices (Scanners, Printers)
Instead of a PC card - supply four USB2 ports and a couple firewire ports in the same space.
Is it possible to make an external PCIX connector that doesn't limit developers to the form factor of a card? Could a PCIX connector on the back of a laptop be used to interface with docking bays of the future? an external dongle can convert PCIX to SCSI/FireWire/GigE/USB2/graphics or whatever high-speed application is needed.
-z
makes sense.
i re Wire,PS2,IRDA,DVD-RW?
I always wondered what the cost savings in a $20 pci network card were over a $25 cardbus network card. Sure, the obvious $5 difference is important, but what about the money (time is money) it takes for a trained computer hardware monkey to shutdown the machine, take all of the cables out and take off the top of the computer, plug in a pci network card, and boot back up? I bet it costs more than $5.
Having something like a compact flash card instead of a pcmcia/cardbus card would be beneficial also, as it is smaller, and you should be able to fit more of them in the same sized space. They also use less power than pci/pcmcia/cardbus since they are typically geared towards a PDA. I wonder if you could stack them vertical in a 5 1/4 computer bay, how many you would be able to fit in a row.
Introducing one more plug-in interface type just muddies the water. What kind of interfaces is your next computer going to have?
isa,pci,pcmcia,agp,vga,CF,MM,SD,IDE,WI-FI,USB,F
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
And what isn't built in can be added using CF cards.
CF isn't fast enough to support modern I/O like 802.11g and FireWire 800, and it certainly isn't fast enough to support a video card.
why not introduce a decent expansion mechanism for _desktop_ computers?
If it costs $1 more, Dell won't do it. Device Bay was defined a few years ago; notice how no one used it. Likewise, PCs don't use CompactPCI even though it's mechanically superior to regular PCI.
It seems that everyone is complaining about the dimentions, and forgetting to complain about the bus...
Basically, this is just a USB2 port with a different connector. How in the hell does that make sense to anyone???
How well do you think your Firewire card is going to perform? That's right, not too damn well. They are actually going to a SLOWER and smaller standard, rather than a faster one, which is incredibly stupid IMHO.
In fact, the only reason I can think that anyone would want to do this, is because it would make USB2 far more common, AND since nothing would possibly go faster than USB2 speeds, it takes away ALL reasons to use any peripherals using any interface other than USB2...
Gee... Your firewire card on your notebook is slower than USB2. Guess we must surrender to Intel, and buy nothing but USB2 devices.
This whole Intel world-domination thing is giving me a big headache. Now notebooks don't have PS/2 connectors anymore, and USB Keyboards/Mouse have serious problems. So we are going from faster, more reliable technologies, to slower, less-reliable ones, just because that's what Intel wants. Screw 'em... I'm going to find a Firewire mouse if it's the last thing I do.
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