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

I don't get it

[dsginter]

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...

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.

I hope they use dongles!

[potus98]

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!

Re:USB?

[jellomizer]

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 But the point of all cards is for them to be outdated and get embedded in the motherboard at some point.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?

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.