Intel Says Farewell To PCI Bus 415
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 already have better (Score:5, Insightful)
ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, some of us do real work we need to be able to interface with serial stuff. You should make like the rest of the kids and get a mac.
Re:ok... (Score:3, Insightful)
And some of us use Macs to do real work which interfaces with serial stuff. That doesn't mean we need a huge D-sub connector in our laptops.
Eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:Now What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:ok... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Because those of us that do real work use them.
Rs232 is still a big standard in the commercial and industrial world.
Re:ok... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people do "real work" with 10BASE2 networks. It's would still be stupid to put 10BASE2 adapters on every motherboard.
Re:You already have better (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ok... (Score:1, Insightful)
No to serial ports, even if there are USB serial adapters.
While i like the idea of throwing everything behind a unified cable format, some things are better left to being separate.
Mainly because serial is a pretty simple communication format to the board compared to USB.
Scrapping simple input systems for more complicated systems is backwards.
I certainly agree with everything else though, especially dependency on PS/2, DAMN WHY IS THAT STILL ALIVE?! IT IS AWFUL.
WORST PORT DESIGN IN THE HISTORY OF ANYTHING, WHAT ARE HALF OF THOSE PRONGS EVEN USED FOR?!
One thing i would like to see happen is orientation-insensitive ports on USB.
I HATE getting the cable in the wrong way. No, i won't turn the damn light on to see the USB logo, nor will i feel around for it to see if i need to rotate it.
It isn't exactly hard to make a phono-lead / headphone style USB plug (jack), there has been quite a few of 3+ input systems in that style of plug over the years.
Making it slightly thicker for the sake of someone not plugging it in to a headphone socket would obviously be a smart idea as well, and it leads to less complications fitting in the wiring.
It doesn't even need to be a circle, even if it was rectangular and still plugged in at any of the 4 90degree angles would be nice.
One can dream...
Re:You already have better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You already have better (Score:3, Insightful)
USB-DB9 (Score:2, Insightful)
Heehee [google.com].
At least Mac users have know about them for a while. Blessings,
Sounds like good news for AMD (Score:3, Insightful)
or any other chip maker willing to continue supporting PCI for a few years while the transition away from PCI finishes up.
Re:Now What? (Score:5, Insightful)
A legacy system.
A better Answer is copy data to non-legacy devices
Re:Now What? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no need to get upset about any of this, as TFA says:
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.
Re:Some of us still have PCI cards (Score:3, Insightful)
You can buy expansion cards that run a PCI bridge off the PCIe bus.
The problem with that is the physical side of things. I've seen adaptors but if you plugged a non low-profile card into them (and IME most cards other than network cards aren't low profile and network cards probablly aren't worth plugging into an adaptor) it wouldn't
I guess you could use one of those cards together with a big case and a flexible riser to put the card beyond the end of the motherboard but still a very messy soloution IMO.
There are also external expansion soloutions but they are both expensive and IMO messy (you have to start thinking about things like power-up order when using them afaict)
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.
You can get core 2 boards with bloody ISA slots! It's pretty much a certainty that motherboard vendors will support PCI for years to come, the only question is at what price (for comparision IIRC the core 2 board with ISA slots was comparable in price to a high end gamer board).
Re:Now What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice try, grasshopper, but the correct response to all those with no sense of humour is.. "whoosh"!
1. Whoosh! ...
2. Ruin stewbacca's first frosty piss ever
3.
4. Profit!
In communist first post world, first post Whooshes you!
Am I doing it right?
Re:You already have better (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd much rather have a 486 that I can run anything on, than a Core i7 that I can only run what Intel says I can.
For some reason I don't believe this statement.
I wasn't aware... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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
Re:And to think, if we just bought 68K machines (Score:2, Insightful)
You might want to tell the military VME is dead, They still use it heavily on ships, helicopters, unmanned drones, ... Compact PCI made some inroads, but no where near replaced VME. Looks like VPX might have a chance at seriously challenging VME, but it will be a long time before VME is dead.
My old computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You already have better (Score:4, Insightful)
The amusing thing is that the Voodoo5 6000 draws around 4A (at 12V) at max load, which is 48W. Add in the PCI power and you're maybe up to 75W.
75W is what a lower-mid-range GPU draws today. The hottest GPU today (NVIDIA GTX 480) is 250W, over 3 times hotter than the Voodoo5 6000.
Re:ok... (Score:3, Insightful)
HDMI lag?
Some displays have processing which involves a delay. My Samsung, for instance, adds a bit of delay for any input not listed as "PC" or "Game," regardless of whether it is VGA, component, or HDMI. (Presumably, it does this so that it can utilize some intra-frame data to do whatever it does, but for all I know it does it just to be annoying.)
The VGA input defaults to PC. The others default to something else that produces a small amount of lag. They're all configurable, though.
(This message is anecdotal instead of an actual attempt at help only because your rants are devoid of sufficient information that help might actually be possible.)