ExpressCards, the new PCMCIA?

randallpowell writes "PC Cards will face competition from ExpressCards in 2005 and 2006. Newer notebook PCs will have them to add wireless, HD-TV broadcast viewing, back-up storage, and more. Microsoft, Dell, and Intel are the major backers of this new expansion slot technology. While smaller, they can easily help users expand their notebook's abilities while PC Cards slowly phase out."

Comments

Re:I don't get it

[Figaro]

I know this is unrealistic, but if you'd read the article you would have found out that this is an extension of PCI Express and PC manufacturers would like to extend this to Desktop PC's.

Photos and more info

[waynegoode]

For photos and more info see PCMCIA's official site for ExpressCard.

This isn't PCMCIA!

[technos]

This isn't PCMCIA-like at all. This is not a new bus. This is just a new standardization for how to connect to the existing PCI-E/USB busses, and a standard on card size! Think of it like hot-swap PCI for laptops.

Say you make a ExpressCard 56K modem. It will appear to the system as a USB device. All the card is doing is using the four pins of the slot that connect to the USB controller. The manufacturer will probably reuse 99% of the code from the USB version.

Say you make a ExpressCard video adaptor. Well, here it uses the couple dozen pins in the slot that connect more or less directly to the PCI-E bus. The manufacturer will probably reuse 95% of the code from the PCI-E version of the adaptor.

Beyond support for hot swap, the Linux kernel folks will have to make few changes.

But will it be a PCI killer?

[strredwolf]

Wait... we have a 10 Mhz 16-bit PC Card Services bus, a faster, 32 bit CardBus, and what's this now?

Let's pull the white paper.

First, it's 1 PCI Express lane (2.5 Gigabit) plus USB 2.0 (480+ Mbit) in about 20 pins. USB already is installed on laptops -- this is just another form factor for it. I'll ignore it and concentrate on PCI Express.

Now what are we using that requires that much bandwidth? All together now: Uncompressed video and Gigabit Ethernet.

I think we'll have alot of high-end laptops in 2005 have this, the ones who need to muck with video on the go.

A side note: Currently mainstream PCI is a 32-bit bus at 33 Mhz (Although we can double the size and the speed, it's allowed in the spec). That's about 132 Megabytes per sec, or 1.056 Gigabit. Five channel, 48Hz 16-bit audio is about 480 Kbyte/s. 1 Gigabit Ethernet would flood a PCI bus -- but current speeds comming out of Cable, DSL, and Fiber To the House are sub-10baseT speeds.

Re:Upside For Users

[Dr. Manhattan]

Another thought. Why not simply use Compact Flash type 2? Allthough there isn't really enough info in the article to compare them..

That's PCMCIA technology, not even Cardbus. Too slow for what they are targeting. They want a videocard on one of these, and CF is limited to, max, about 12MB/sec. And CF has to tolerate much slower speeds, like on a 33MHz PDA.