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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."
In fact I never leave home without it but it fuxored my laptop when I inserted it.
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Is the goal of everything to eventually become a choking hazzard? What was wrong with the old PCMCIA infrastructure? Why not just add some additional bandwidth and be done with it?
What we need is a good upgradeable PCI standard for desktops so that people can slide their cards in without opening the case. *That* would be innovative...
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Sounds like PC card only smaller. Killer app aside, this could alow smaller laptops/palmtops to accept the kind of expansion devices we've come to expect from PC cards. I mean sure, many devices are comming through with built-in firewire/usb/networking, but this could reduce initial cost as well as size, or imagine a laptop with 4 expansion slots... It's all good. I'm excited to see what comes of it.
Now if only someone could build an AGP device thats PC card size or smaller... get me a radeon x800 for my (imaginary) Powerbook G5.
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Picture here.
This just seems really useless to me.
While cards are nice and compact, USB/Firewire are fast enough now to be able to do anything that pc. Granted they're good for adding things like wireless to old computers but I don't think the cardbus will be the bottleneck for sometime, so why get rid of the old standard.
Why don't they just try to make USB 3.0 the end all be all of interfaces and have 1 type of port.
Maybe this is more of a pc problem. I just finally used my card slot on my powerbook (for wireless) last month, and if I bought any new mac this would be unnecessary.
don't believe it
Oooooh ooooh! I hope the figure out a way to use easy-to-break and impossible-to-find vendor-proprietary dongles for all my connections! That would be awesome!
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Yes just because carrying a lot of additional USB equipment and cables get bothersome. The problem with PCMCIA cards is the fact that laptops are getting thinner and thiner and a laptop that has enough space to hold 2 PCMCIA cards are considered bulky monsters. Besides these cards are used for high bandwidth stuff. But the point of all cards is for them to be outdated and get embedded in the motherboard at some point. remember the PCMCIA eathernet cards with those dongles that break every 5 minutes?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The article is kinda skimpy on details for those of us who are visual-type people, so here is a link to an image comparing a PCMCIA card to the two ExpressCard forms.
Enjoy!
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
For photos and more info see PCMCIA's official site for ExpressCard.
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.
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Unfortunately, reports indicate that Express Cards cannot be used to replace video cards, whether due to heat, archtecture limitations or power consumption, I'm not sure.
It certainly would be nice to be able to upgrade laptop video, even if all you could get would be the Mobile and Go series of GPUs. It would easily increase the life of a laptop gaming system by a few years.
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
Going by the lack of Linux support for other such technologies (mini-PCI wifi on laptops)
Huh? What are you talking about? If a driver supports the Cardbus version, it supports the mini-PCI version.
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.
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It would be even *funnier* if it was spelled VESACards (notice the all caps on VESA) :)
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Okay it's a little smaller than PCMCIA and probably a lot faster or whatever. Natural evolution? Yeah, I guess so.
But I looked at a web site showing a PC/Workstation with a card slot in front and apparantly there are two sizes of slots... the smaller cards are still compatible with the larger slot but it doesn't look nice at all... not to me anyway. I'm getting there would be an easy way to make it look more slick but the picture didn't appeal to me.
Changing formats always has a pain component. Moving away from floppies wasn't all that painful but it has been very long and drawn out and even now, I am still using them for small things like ghost boots and stuff like that. I hope it's worthwhile but I can't help but wonder why they didn't make it somehow work in the PCMCIA format? They could call it PCMCIA2 or something. I guess there are reasons that I'll never hear for all of that.
Linux support is an assumption I make right now... I assume it will happen rapidly. People choked when USB started to catch on and I've never had problems with PCMCIA with Linux but then again, it was only within the past two years that I started using Linux on a laptop anyway. But with some of the players out there now (Intel) I think Linux support will be a given. Intel would be stupid to let Microsoft influence them against Linux at this point since Microsoft isn't supporting their 64bit processors particularly well.
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.
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Besides the confusion you see here, one may note that ExpressCard, besides the name, is not new at all. It was originaly named "NEWCARD" and announced 2 years ago.
FYI, you can find more about its history here, here, and here.
2 USB slots, which I use both of almost always (swapping is quite a hassle)
Rejoice, for I bring good tidings; There is a device called a 'USB Hub' that allows branching off of a single port. Since you're already dragging around multiple USB devices that you need to swap back and forth, another one won't be that big of a deal especially given the tiny sizes some of the hubs come in. Oh, and the PCMCIA slot you wish was replaced by '1 or 2' extra USB ports? You can get 2 or even 4 port USB PCCards if you don't want an external hub off the laptop's built in port. Check eBay; prices for those are under $20 including shipping.
I got one so my slightly older laptop could take advantage of USB 2.0. There's a good reason for having some kind of generic port on the side of the laptop. It was a LOT cheaper to get a card than a new laptop to use my USB 2.0 CD-RW drive. A year or so after these new slots are installed in laptops with FW800 and USB 2.0, there's going to be FW1600 and USB 3.0. For those who can't afford a whole new machine it sure is nice to just get a little card to take advantage of whatever new tech comes along.
Several problems. Not everyone is you... I use PCMCIA for gps, for a smartcard reader I play with, and for a few weird network cards when I'm playing around (token ring and arcnet... can't find the localtalk one). I'd even like to find a PCMCIA tv tuner someday...
And USB isn't a replacement. For one, it demands 500mA of power, per USB. Most laptops can't promise that, beyond 1-2, or at most, 3 usb ports. And then there is the entire bandwidth thing... USB was truly meant to be for pointers and keyboards, and other low bandwidth stuff. The protocol shows this, anytime you have 2 greedy devices wanting all the bandwidth. Even USB2 suffers from this.
And you'll rethink that integrated wireless, when one day it just stops working because a bad antenna/hinge design (and they're all bad, every single one) chews the antenna in half. And it will likely be 3 hours after the warranty is up.
Of course not. Why would you think a new connector that is basically does a superset of cardbus and USB would be capable of what the two of them aren't? How do you think this would work? Would it magically worm it's way into the connection between your LCD and the motherboard to handle I/O?
Making extra hardware in the LCD to convert NTSC or PAL into something it can understand would mean adding a processor to the LCD itself, which means the screen would be thicker and more cumbersome. Further, you don't get any of the advantages you get with a full system, such as the ability to encode and record inputs, and the opportunity to put the inputs in a place where they're less likely to break. No one would do that; it's a bad design.
If that's very important to you, just buy an LCD with that capability (they make them, but not for laptops). It'll be a lot thicker and heavier than the equivalent VGA-signal only laptop display. Or go with the USB, Firewire, or PCMCIA "anolog input solutions."
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Its called an antenna. You want your WiFi to work, dont you?
One thing you could do is get a better card that has a detatchable antenna (I have a high power SMC card that does this). Then get a connector cable and a small antenna you can stick on the back of your laptop (they have flat antennas). the cable will only stick out a little (like 1/8"), much better!
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Hello,
3Com makes the unimpressively-named 3CRPAG175, a CardBus card with an XJack-style retractable antenna.
I use one in my IBM ThinkPad T23 and it works quite well--no problems with the antenna getting stuck or failing to retract.
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Aryeh Goretsky
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The PCMCIA folks, who are behind this ExpressCard thing, want $349 USD for a copy of the standard, and it is only available in electronic form.
I can understand a small printing fee for a dead-tree copy. But sheesh, when will these guys follow the lead of the IEEE on the 802. standards and just open them up?
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unfortanitly, you kind of need the antenna. Laptops that contain internal cards have an antenna that usually runs around the display just under the plasitics. Apples laptops for example, used to just have what was pretty much just a PCCARD card with antenna jack. It sat just below the standard card slot but staggered away from the edge of the case.
What would have been nice: including contact for the antenna at pin side of the cards, so the antenna could be optional. Or even just a card that sits flush but has a flexible wire antenna of some type.
Either way with all the memory and device interfaces lately I really don't think this is appropriate. Seems like it been physically reduced too far, though a standard interntal USB interfave would be nice.
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No, the bandwidth (2.5 Gbps in each direction) of the 1x PCI Express Lane in an ExpressCard can't compete with an AGP8X built in solution (2.1 GB/sec). The ExpressCard power limitations would keep it from working as well, but primarily its bandwidth.
However, the beauty of PCI Express (and ExpressCard) is that your entire machine will be using the same buses for all communication (from the Northbridge on...). None of this AGP for the GPU, PCI for the other devices and an adapter chip to provide CardBus/16-Bit PC Card support that adds complexity and cost to every motherboard. Each device will speak PCI Express and/or USB. All you need is a good Northbridge and the appropriate connectors.
Two ExpressCard/32 cards will fit in the space currently used by a PC Card slot. And the fact that the PCIExpress/USB connection simply taps into the existing buses means that your ExpressCard connectors don't have to be co-located. (Right now your CardBus/PC Card slot MUST be as close as possible to the (typically TI) Cardbus Host Adapter.)
Similarly it should be trivial to add an ExpressCard connector to a desktop (as all new desktops have PCIExpress and USB) and your ExpressCard modules can be reused.
Software isn't an issue because PCI Express is simply a Physical Layer change. All existing PCI code will work with PCI Express out of the box.
There's a fly in the ointment though. Along with ExpressCard, there's also PCI Express Mini Card. PCI Express Mini Card (51mm x 30mm) is very similar in physical size to ExpressCard (75mm x 34mm), but though they both have USB and PCIExpress connections, the connectors are completely different. ExpressCard is a mere 26 pins, but PCI Express Mini Card is 52 (and a PCI Express 1x is 36).
ExpressCard and PCI Express Mini Card aren't competitors, though. PCI Express Mini Cards are for internal connections while your ExpressCard is physically encased and protected. As a hardware designer, though, I wish the two standards shared a bit more commonality. If, at least, the PCB sizes could be exactly the same, we would probably see most ExpressCard products come out as PCI Express Mini Cards (and visa versa). I don't know if that will happen as the circuit board would have to be completely redesigned (for space-constrained designs).
Oh, and one more thing...
PCI Express, even in its 32 Lane (8 GB/sec unencoded) form, has too much latency for direct memory access. Hypertransport does not suffer from this same deficiency.
So, I'm expected to just upgrade for the joy of hardware troubleshooting?! Problem is, there is no compelling reason to break backward compatibility in this case - no new features, and the speed of existing cards generally isn't an issue.
That compatibility is expected to give ExpressCard a boost over prior PC cards in ease of installation and configuration with the Windows operating system...
Yeah, right. First of all, I'm no Windows fan, but it seems to me that PCMCIA was one of the few things that Windows did get right. If you had drivers for the device, Windows loaded them without hassle whenever you inserted the card. How much easier could it get?
Heck, even Linux works well with PCMCIA devices - to be honest, I don't even know which drivers my PCMCIA ethernet card uses because I've never had to figure it out. I just plug the card in, and it works.
Looks to me like a real flop. If you're going to break backward compatibility, you have to offer your customers a compelling reason to buy your product, i.e. better performance, new features, etc... I did RTFA, and it seems like the new Express architecture is little more than an excuse to keep engineers and programmers employed.
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