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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
Number of buses that have been killed off during the years is considerable:
And those are only the ones I can come up with out of my head.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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....
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
You mean like Belkin's? Or my fav, this one (1394b with FW800 support)? Yes.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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
Micro Channel wasn't killed, it committed suicide.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Wait until you need to talk to something that cares about timing.
I remember VLB and ISA as well. In fact my first gamer rig, with its upgraded to the max 100Mhz Pentium and 16Mb of RAM is STILL running 5 days a week at a local lumber factory running a custom column lathe with an ISA card and DOS 3. I thought the guy was gonna break down crying when I said "Yeah, I think I got a couple of old ISA PCs".
Hell just a few months back I sold an old S3 12Mb PCI card, to a guy whose onboard had fried. I called him a week later to see when he wanted me to order him a more modern card and he said 'Why Bother? This card runs my business software just fine, and Windows 2000 is rock solid stable with it, so I'll just stick with it.'
That is why you should visit your local mom&pop PC shop every once in a while. Think of us like a giant flea market of PC parts of all ages. We're usually bored, so just come in and bullshit a little while and we'll be happy to let you rummage through the bins, you never know what you'll find!
As for TFA, has AMD announced they will follow suit? It sounds like another way for AMD to differentiate their product, as there are plenty of folks out there still using PCI (prosumer audio especially) and an AMD 4 or 6 core CPU will be more than fast enough for those tasks, and be quite affordable as well.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...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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