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Intel Says Farewell To PCI Bus
KingofGnG writes with this snippet from Sir Arthur's Den, which will make my desktop computer sad: "Soon another technology that in past years dominated the always changing universe of computer hardware will bite the dust. That's the decision by Intel, the merciless executioner of standards that the company itself imposes on the market. In upcoming months it will end official support for the PCI bus. Developed by the chipmaker in 1993, the PCI Local Bus standard was implemented on all motherboards for x86 and compatible platforms until 2004, the year it passed the baton to the younger and faster PCI Express technology."
Now what am I supposed to do with my Voodoo II video card?
Any Intel motherboard you buy will have a chipset with Intel GMA graphics on it. Virtually every GMA in current production, from the GMA 950 in netbooks to the four-digit GMAs on desktop and larger laptop PCs, is at least as powerful as a Voodoo3.
Back when they started dropping ISA support, I had to hunt a bit for a board with ISA support. Things like sound cards, modems, COM / LPT port cards, and so on all came on ISA cards. The couple of desktops that I've used only had one PCI card between them - a network card because there weren't drivers for the on-board one. It's much less common to have a collection of PCI cards than it was to have a collection of ISA (or EISA / VLB) cards to move to a new machine. Graphics cards are about the only thing that you regularly find as expansion cards, and these are typically upgraded at least as frequently as the motherboard anyway.
PCI is now more of a way of connecting the chips on the motherboard than a way of connecting daughter boards, and as such it's far less traumatic when it is replaced by something newer. Aside from driver developers, few people care what interconnect is used between two chips on a motherboard.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We'd still have Nubus
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Put a hex on intel?
I for one will miss PCI about as much as I miss ISA. Not at all.
Let's not be too sentimental now, this tech served us well, but its just that: tech.
I wasn't too happy that Intel axed the parallel port, but I could get cards/USB adapters for that. Now they axe PCI? I still have a Soundblaster X-Fi, its likely the last PCI card I'll ever buy.
This will lead to headaches for embedded and industrial system users, most of them are now just moving from ISA to PCI based solutions. There were a few P4 motherboards with ISA slots for that market even.
I realize it's time to move on, but I'm still happily running several prosumer audio cards that will probably see their end with my next hardware cycle.
Gina, Layla, Darla... farewell.
Can we get rid of PS/2, VGA, parallel, and serial ports now, too? Hell, let's axe DVI in favor if HDMI while we're at it!
Oh, and can someone tell the shitty mobo makers to stop requiring MS DOS floppy disks to flash their BIOSs?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I'm just getting used to these new fangled AGP cards and their single connectors. I feel so much more secure with the dual connectors of my VLB cards....Maybe if I saw the boards in half they'll work in my new PCI-based motherboards. What do think? They fit, but all I get is sparks and a strange smoking smell....
This seems like a fairly minimal matter.
Intel is shaving a few more pennies off the implementation cost for boring business boxes that will see no expansion at all, gamer boxes that will see no expansion beyond a so-new-the-solder-is-still-warm graphics card, and your basic home-user "everything-on-motherboard" use cases.
Given the availability of PCIe to PCI bridge chips(both ones for cheaply retooling a PCI design into a PCIe design, and ones for hanging an actual PCI bus off a PCIe bus), motherboards to accommodate PCI cards should be available at a fairly modest premium for another 5 years, and at an industrial/embedded/specialty premium for another decade or two....
Time to get a PCIe PCI controller card.
most on board chips use pci and using pci-e for some of them is a waste of lanes.
Most on board sound is still pci based.
Most severs have on board pci video and I don't x1 pci-e video chips out there.
How many people still living even remember the other "local bus" that preceded it, VESA Local Bus? I still have two boxed motherboards with VLB slots and a couple interface cards intended for it.
Thanks for phasing that out, Intel.
Reasonable security standards are one thing.
Security standards designed only to appease security vendors are a waste of shareholder $$$.
You must not have done well at sawing the board in half. At the very least, you shouldn't be getting sparks. The worst you'd have done is sever most of the connections on the card. Not having electricity making a complete circuit isn't the same as a short circuit.
max 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes? wow that is way to few!
A video card eats up about 8-16 just for video.
add sata 6 about 4
usb 3 2-4??
When will ISA...err I mean...LPC go away? Oh right, Intel TPM relies on it.
From TFA:
Intel PCI-free chipsets expected to be unveiled are H67, P67 e H61, they will implement the new LGA1155 CPU socket (which would be a pin less than the current LGA1156), will support 8 independent PCIe 2.0 lanes, Serial ATA connections at 6 Gigabits and 14 USB 2.0 ports. Just to be clear, these chipset are targeted at the consumer market while the new chipsets designed for the enterprise market (Q67, Q65 e B65) will continue to support the PCI bus.
So, Intel says farewell, except that it didn't.
Even if they were, if there's money to be had, I'm pretty sure someone will carve some silicon that motherboard manufacturers can use to bridge PCIe with PCI further downstream from the chipset.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Out of curiosity, I was looking for motherboards that still support ISA, and apparently there's still a market...
This ATX board I found, supporting C2Duo/C2Quad processors, has ISA, 4x serial, parallel, FDD, PS/2 mouse & keyboard, etc., in addition to dual gigabit Ethernet, RAID, SATA, PCI-Express x16, PCI, HD audio, DDR2, etc.
http://www.adek.com/PDF/MB-P4BWA.pdf
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Freaky. I wonder if the manufacturer provides driver support for Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 warp...
or maybe the joke missed you? (hint: GMA 950 and voodoo 3 have one thing in common, namely no hardware T&L)
On the other hand, most pci-e x16 devices can technically run at only x1 if the physical slot arrangement allows.
I am taking a guess that your last sentence was "... and I don't know of any x1 pci-e video chips out there." Part of the PCIe spec requires that the two points must able to run with fewer lanes than they were designed for. You can connect an x16 chip to an x1 chip and they will still work together. You may not be pleased by the results but it won't stop it from running.
Define "real work" for me, will you.
In physics, work is a force applied through a distance. Information processing involves far less "work" in the physics sense than, say, controlling a cutting plotter.
Another news: pcie to pci adapter sell like hot cake since 6/23/2010. http://www.beaglesoft.com/pcie2pci.htm
Can we get rid of [...] VGA
No. Affordable PC-to-SDTV adapters take VGA input, not HDMI input.
Hell, let's axe DVI in favor if HDMI while we're at it!
DVI and HDMI are the same thing. The differences are 1. the connector, and 2. displays with the HDMI connector are more likely to support the audio extension to the protocol.
Meanwhile you can measure the generations by counting the number of adapters and dongles coming out of my Modem M.
If by "Modem M" you meant the IBM Model M keyboard for PC, consider the USB successor to the Model M.
Heehee.
At least Mac users have know about them for a while. Blessings,
or any other chip maker willing to continue supporting PCI for a few years while the transition away from PCI finishes up.
Can we declare floppies of all sorts and CRTs to be obsolete and move on, too?
I can't *believe* how many places are still providing floppy drives; our junk drawers are full, and a single thumb drive is 20,000 floppies large!
(Hell I'm just doing handstands because they finally took out that stupid 'double-hole' in PC motherboards. Since nearly day one there was an ECO issued, and no one could be certain if the very last motherboard using the wrong pattern had finally died. BUT IT HAS! I was so sick of that!
I'd like to see a standardization towards double-height (or in the original nomenclature 'full height' drives, but done a different way:
Take the full-height bay and put four devices on it, with a USB connection, making them fully hot-swappable. After all these years, malware has made it such a pain to plug-n-play the entire stock of a user's data, and dropping all the user-specific data into a USB cradle would be a wonderful way to clear the disks, without taking up desk space, etc.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Excellent! I knew MicroChannel would win eventually! I am so sitting pretty with my model 80 and 95. Go Big Blue! Go Big Blue!
You must not have done well at sawing the board in half. At the very least, you shouldn't be getting sparks. The worst you'd have done is sever most of the connections on the card. Not having electricity making a complete circuit isn't the same as a short circuit.
You must not have sawed many boards in half. I find that many of the traces end up dragging into other traces, and much of the time there are ground planes in there that get bent into other traces. Don't critique another person's board sawing when you clearly haven't sawed many boards of your own.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
...if you purchased a brand new SATA-based mass-storage device in the last few weeks; THROW IT AWAY! Here comes SATA II...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I'm with you on PS2 and VGA but
a. Some of us need serial, real serial that really works, not some half-functioning USB dongle.
b. It's seems too early to drop DVI, but if the adapters from HDMI work spectacularly well, and the HDMI connectors are cheaper, then I'd be down with that.
c. Printer ports are too big: they use too much material and too much space. We could save money by dropping them, and I think USB to parallel converters work fine, but I have no experience with them. It seems like there are two reasons why people use parallel ports, though: the first is old printers, the second is to get fast bidirectional 5v data on and off the machine, which is good for LEDs, sensors, and talking to chips. Are there good USB based alternatives to the parallel port for that?
The big point here should not be removing kruft, but rather lowering costs, lowering energy use and making smaller motherboards fit in tighter places. So, for example, if patents on the HDMI connector make it more expensive than a DVI connector, then we should stay with DVI.
And I just bought an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum card to ensure a Pulseaudio-free, hardware-mixed audio future...
...that Intel was the only manufacturer of motherboards out there.
Sure they're heavy hitters in the field, but if enough people and companies start buying AMD so they can use their 'legacy' PCI equipment in a native PCI slot, this could get interesting...
I know of a company that had to switch laptop suppliers simply because the ones they had been using stopped supplying DSUB serial ports, which the company needed to interface with industrial monitoring and test equipment. The so-called USB / serial port adapter dongles didn't work worth crap for the equipment they were trying to interface with: they needed a native serial port. Yet they could still get the pretty-much-useless firewire support in just about every model...
cc
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Since I have quite a few Adaptec PCI SCSI cards and a few PCI network cards, plus a TV Tuner PCI card or two, I wondered if any of these can be found in PCI-E. Yes for the tuner cards and the network cards (and not too expensive) but holly cow are SCSI PCI-E cards expensive! What to do with my HP-scanjet?
So we still have PCI Express for video cards, but whats going to be the replacement bus for other cards (sound cards, wireless network cards, additional Hard drive interfaces, extra USB ports, and custom stuff?
There is also, basically, an ISA bus on your motherboard; in the form of Low Pin Count bus. As a matter of fact...PCI -> PCIe have somewhat similar relation to the one between ISA -> LPC. Roughly the same logically, as far as software is concerned, but implemented using less parallel approach. So your "using pci-e for some of them is a waste of lanes" is probably unjustified.
On board sound might be PCI based logically, but it's partly integrated into the chipset. The "audio chip" you see on a motherboard is often little more than a codec, not sitting on PCI anyway. Similar with Ethernet PHY. Super I/O and BIOS sits on LPC. And "main" chipset often sits on PCIe already.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Price: $139.95 :(
I don't have any PCI board which could justify such investiment.
Looking at the picture of the board reminds me of the Voodoo/Banshee/TNT/3dfx/Nvidia/Matrox/ATI 60000 video card, yes you know the one. :)
Stop requiring MS DOS floppy disks
For every system I know of, one can flash a BIOS using drive C:. Just partition accordingly or acquire an SD to PATA adapter.
Thanks, you had to go and remind me that my computer is OLD... Holy crap! I've never had a workstation computer for 6 years and still used! Will wonders never cease. Thanks Linux!
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'm still upset about the demise of the S-100 bus.
Don't forget industrial controllers too
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh well, time for people who can't upgrade their legacy hardware (think high end capture cards, they're hideously expensive to replace) to move to AMD... oh wait, I already did.
The PCI Bus is a complicated bus ... the main problems are contention and arbitration ... it is also complicated to set up ... very very complicated standard. Replace it with something better ...
x
It was a 8-bit-parallel 1 MB/s bus mainly used for connecting measurement equipment together - sensors, digital oscilloscopes, etc. HP did also use it for connecting disk drives and printers to some of their early PCs. Wikipedia still remembers how it worked.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The VAXen also used MASSBUS, a honking fat parallel cable bus that connected disk and tape drives to the computer. It was also supported on PDP-10s and some PDP-11s. IIRC, it was about 2.2MB/s, much faster than the Unibus.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most laptops I've seen do include an RJ45 jack, but it's connected to an Ethernet chip, not a UART, so please don't plug it into some piece of RS232 gear expecting successful connections.
Also, the pinout for RS232 support on RJ45 jacks isn't standardized (unlike the pinouts on 25-pin and 9-pin D connectors.) The most common one I encounter is Cisco's, and most other router and firewall equipment makers tend to follow that because everybody's got the 9-pin-to-Cisco-RJ45 adapters, but even then there's the question of whether you need a straight-through or rollover cable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If your SCSI array counts as "Legacy" already, you're probably better off with a SATA drive and maybe an SSD for caching/journaling, but I assume AMD's supporting PCI for a while still.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's getting really annoying - I'd like to get an LCD monitor as an upgrade for my old CRT - but my current motherboard graphics can only drive 1280x1024, which is lame, so I'll need a graphics card. And almost all of the AGP graphics cards are lame too - they won't do 1920x1280, though some might do 1680x1050, so basically I'd need to upgrade the motherboard to do PCI-express. And while there are 500MB PATA disk drives, nobody's really selling them any more, just SATA, so I'd need to either get a PCI-to-SATA card or upgrade the motherboard.
And most of the new motherboards than have PCI-e and SATA only have enough PATA ports to drive a CD/DVD player, not to put one or especially two 500 MB disks on it, so I'll have to put those in a USB shoebox.
It's tempting to ignore the whole process and just get one of those little ATOM processor desktops, but most of them seem to have really lousy choices of graphics support, e.g. 1366x10xx graphics, and don't have enough RAM to run VMware; probably the next generation will have faster ATOM and more RAM.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Ah, the sweet 286 that had the million dollar SoundBlaster MicroChannel card.
Not even an honorable mention for PCI-X? PCI-X came between PCI and PCI-Express as a server type bus for Gigabit cards and Ultra 320 SCSI Adapters.
Don't knock ISA. Embedded systems still use ISA, although in the PC/104 connector.
Also the EPIC board spec: http://www.epicsbc.com/index.shtml is board spec for embedded systems that uses the PC/104 spec.
ISA is very nice for situations where simplicity is important.
ISA lives!
And they still include a floppy port. I'd rather have a PCI bus than floppy port. I haven't had a floppy in my computers in years but still use PCI cards.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Maybe if I saw the boards in half they'll work in my new PCI-based motherboards. What do think? They fit, but all I get is sparks and a strange smoking smell....
That's just the magic happening. You remember, it's the same magic that you put inside it from the microwave oven step?
You mean the Bitchin' Fast! 3D 2000, the only card with 5 of the hottest 3D chipsets.
http://www.planetdognine.com/features/humor/files/bfast.jpg
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
What am I supposed to do with my PCI Planet ISDN card? No more multilink PPP dialup over ISDN... I guess I will have to go out and try this new fangled broadband interwebs access thingy from Time Warner.
Oddly enough, an OS/2 driver wouldn't be that surprising. WfWg perhaps not.
I just recently used a hdmi connection from a netbook to a (intended as by vendor) computer monitor and it was completely lagless. I've heard there are lag issues with tv's that process the picture by upsampling, interpolating in-between frames (like 120hz tv's) or some other processing. That has more to do with your display than the hdmi standard, I THINK
most on board chips use pci
Most boards don't have a whole lot of stuff that isn't integrated into the chipset anyway and when they do these days it tends to be mostly stuff that is too fast to really work well on PCI (firewire being a notable exception).
Note that just because device manager (or whatever your operating systems equivalent is) says something is on the PCI bus doesn't mean it is really on a PCI bus. Afaict most systems these days have a virtual top-level PCI bus from which the real PCI bus and PCIe controllers in the system branch (PCIe is designed to look like PCI to software).
and using pci-e for some of them is a waste of lanes.
mmm, lane shortages are already a problem for the more featurefull motherboards on the LGA1156 platform (and it's not helped by the fact that desktop board vendors usually CBA to provide a bloody block diagram so you can tell what compromises have been made before choosing). This new platform will apparently increase the lane count slightly but I still see it being a problem.
Most on board sound is still pci based.
No it isn't the core of the sound is integrated into the southbridge. The codec* is then connected to the southbridge over a specialist bus
Most severs have on board pci video and I don't x1 pci-e video chips out there.
Some server/workstation boards do indeed still use PCIe but the intel one I have (SC5650WS) does use PCIe x1 (at least according to the diagrams in the manual)
*Note: the term codec has at least two meanings in the computer industry, probablly more. In this context it means a chip that provides both analog to digital and digital to analog conversion.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Don't forget LPC bus, that's also sort of ISA. And in most (all?) current PCs.
One that hath name thou can not otter
so, i need to buy a PCI-E to PCI adapter in order to hook up any of my PCI to (USB/SATA/PATA) devices in the future?
This probably isn't about bandwidth, but moving forward. Sure, PCI can handle a lot of the devices, but it can't handle every device. Moving forward, we have the option to do something like we did with PCI/ASA and have two physically different slots on the motherboard, or we can move forward with a scaling interface that supports auto speed negotiation and is physically compatible at all speeds of operation. (ie: put a PCI-E 2x card into a PCI-E 16x slot and it'll work.) This offers more flexibility when building out systems for different types of users, and takes the next step forward to give hardware with the new design a longer life. (ie: If PCI had been scalable in the same way, all those PCI cards would still be worth something, as would those ASA cards if they too had been compatible in the same way PCI-E is.)
One time I sawed off the back of a PCI-E 8x slot on my motherboard and put a PCI-E 16x video card in, sticking clean out of the back of the slot, and it worked like a charm. You just can't do that kind of thing with ASA and PCI.
PCI has a controller sitting between the CPU and the expansion slots -- it's not truly local. The definition of a "local bus" was stretched (mostly by Intel) to include PCI despite this, but in its original meaning, it referred to an architecture where the expansion slots are directly connected to the CPU, possibly permitting level shifters or buffers but certainly no logic. PCI doesn't even run at the CPU's FSB anymore! How local is that?
VESA Local Bus truly was, although its reliance on 5-volt levels condemned it to obsolescence as soon as chips went to 3.3 and lower voltages for their I/O. These days nothing except the northbridge is local.
Hmmm... IIRC patents are god for? 17y still? 2010-1993 = 17
hmmm....
or already exist?