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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."
You can buy expansion cards that run a PCI bridge off the PCIe bus. The chips cost about $5 in bulk, $50 retail for the cards, and make more sense than including the PCIe to PCI bridge chip on all motherboards, when most people don't need them. If there's a large enough market for industrial PCs that have PCI slots then no doubt some board maker will produce a motherboard with the chip built in. All this announcement means is that there won't be PCI support in Intel's southbridge chips.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Google for "PCI PCI-e expansion box" (no quotes). One of the first few hits should be for a box that turns a 1x PCI-e slot into 4 33MHz/32bit PCI slots. We recently considered buying one for our PCI National Instruments boards because there are fewer cheap, commodity motherboards with lots of PCI slots.
Since many current systems implement PCI via a PCIe to PCI bridge chip, there is no reason a riser or backplane card cannot be made to connect to the PCIe bus.
In fact, a quick search for such a beast hit a Google Ad that offered a variety of combinations, starting with one that will connect a low-profile PCI card to a PCIe slot for EUR49.
And system vendors can do the same thing to keep offering PCI slots on the motherboard itself.
There's still a few manufacturers making C2D boards with a limited number of ISA slots : http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm and http://www.commell.com.tw/product/SBC/P4BWA.HTM are two examples.