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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."
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.
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.
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....
Screw that, what about my $2800.00 Sensor input card for this pile of thermocouples and Ph probes in the lab? I guess it's time to go out and buy some PC gear with PCI to make sure the lab can have parts for repairs until the idiots in management give us money to buy new test gear.
That's the real rub. Those of us doing REAL work with computers are getting screwed. Most new scientific and high end test equipment still use PCI and RS232.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not surprised at all. Just a few months ago I did a job fixing a computer that controls some part of a multi-million dollar ship. The software requires a specific card, that specific card is only available with an ISA interface.
Since PCI still has enough bandwidth to manage 100% of the consumer sound cards, >90% of the consumer network cards and 75% of all other non-video cards, I think it's way too soon.
.sig: No such file or directory
A Better Question is how am I going to hook up my legacy scsi array?
A legacy system.
A better Answer is copy data to non-legacy devices
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
...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
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