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Hardware

'Legacy-Free' PCs Appearing Everywhere 333

Posted by Roblimo from the old-news-that's-new-again dept.
gjt writes "Finally. The death of of the ISA slot is near. Red Herring is running a story on the Legacy Free PC. Plug all of your mice, keyboards, joysticks, modems, etc. into the Universal Serial Bus. Compaq is releasing a computer called the Vista which will do just that. Yes, Apple did that over a year ago with the iMac and PCI based G3 and G4. Of course, if you're like me, you'd want to build your own box. Asus makes legacy free "PC 99" compliant motherboards. I wonder if this means more IRQ numbers. And what's the state of USB and Firewire support in Linux?" Suddenly USB is everywhere. Will it take hold? A lot of PC manufacturers sure seem to think so.
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'Legacy-Free' PCs Appearing Everywhere More

'Legacy-Free' PCs Appearing Everywhere

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  • Status of Linux USB (Score:4)

    by kroah ( 751 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @09:46PM (#1550462) Homepage Journal
    USB is up and running just fine in the 2.3.x series of kernels.
    There is even a backport of the USB stack into 2.2.12 right here [www.suse.cz]
    Also check out the USB HowTO [dynamine.net] for getting started.

    And the main Linux-USB page is www.linux-usb.org [linux-usb.org]

  • USB (Score:1)

    by NaCh0 ( 6124 )
    USB is nice, but I'd like to see more FireWire.
  • PC's are aiming for the mainstream, and most consumers will not miss support for the legacy hardware. As long as the computer has a modem, and capabilities for peripherals such as printers and joysticks, the computer is appealing to the masses. USB supports all these technologies. For more high end customers, FireWire will complete the package. Apple realized this a long time ago, and the rest of the world is following suit.
  • Sure USB will become a standard. Some hardware vendors
    are offering more USB Scanners (for example) than SCSI ones.

    I understand the latest development kernels have USB
    support, but support for specific devices is a bit patchy

  • Re:USB (Score:1)

    by Psiren ( 6145 )
    I think that with the upcoming version of USB increasing speeds to need that of FireWire, its not going to make it. Only Apple seem to be supporting it in their machines, along with a few DV Camcorders etc.
  • USB (seems to) work on the mac, but the most popular OS that supports USB has, well, dubious reliability. Mice and keyboards don't gain much, if anything, by using USB vs. PS/2 ports. I've even heard horror stories from USB periphs in Be, which has official mice and keyboards.

    Don't know about BIOS-level support, but the drivers need to give us about as much flak as the current keyboard .INFs before I see this as a real replacement to my PS/2 ports.


    For a PC to be truly legacy free what must you get rid of?

    [could_be_dead_wrong]
    AFAIK....

    ISA
    PS/2
    FDD
    serial and parallel ports

    ...and anything that uses an IRQ.

    once we get rid of these, we might get a performance gain on non-legacy busses, etc.

    [/could_be_dead_wrong]

    Anybody know more than I do?
  • What makes them great is that at long last we have a virtually limitless number of slots for devices. 127 on a USB bus, 63 on a Firewire bus. Only problem is, it's not getting implimented correctly. For example, vendors are making USB hard drives and removable media drives. USB was NOT designed for this. It's certainly faster than serial connections or good ol' ADB, but it was designed for low bandwidth peripherals, i.e. modems, keyboards, mouses, printers, cameras. I'd love to see more Firewire devices (especially sotrage) out there...bye bye SCSI!



  • ... what Compaq and others like it are really saying is 'this is now our platform, get used to it.' - Howe

    two words: limited option. how about if we don't like it?


    --

  • Does this mean no more jumpers? (Score:4)

    by KBrown ( 7190 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @10:00PM (#1550473) Homepage
    I don't know you, but with only 15 IRQs I prefer to buy ISA cards which still use jumpers so I can control which IRQs I want to use.

    And this is because my BIOS is so "SMART" that it does not want to use the IRQ 12 for a PCI card even if I explicitly specified not to use any serial mouse neither it's IRQ (12). The same happens with the second serial port and IRQ 3.

    So if I want to use any of these IRQs I have to use a card with jumpers and set them to either IRQ 3 or 12 or 7 (the parport) and this is the only thing I can do if I begin running out of IRQs.

    What will happen when I am no longer able to purchase a MB with ISA slots where I can use jumpers to choose the IRQs I like for my cards?

    What will I do to all the ISA cards with jumpers I have purchased during the years?

    What will I do if Linux USB support and Fire Wire support are not ready yet when that moment arrives?

    Will some day Alan Cox and Linus say yes to Devfs so I can know with more accuracy where to find my USB, SCSI and Fire Wire devices without the need to have 10 000+ /dev nodes for every possible piece of hardware I can plug in my machine?
  • USB is already being skipped over for Firewire by most of the higher end video cameras. For a short time maybe you'll see these USB-only boards, but it's not going to be long before we have USB & Firewire boards. Now if I could just get a toaster to plug into a USB, I'd be set.
  • In my last post I wrote 'Fire Wire', but now I've just read 'Firewire'.

    Which of them is the correct one?

  • Well, you *have* heard of eternal, havent you :)

    Actually, if this is a problem for you (like is is for me), then the answer is obvious : Get an old box, like a 386, drop on a modem and an NE2000 and IP Masq it.. not that I've got my set up to work yet or anything **grin**
  • Ok... I have some ISA cards. I admit it...
    they're not all that bad and I'll always have hardware around
    that can use them...
    I do like seeing pci only mb's out there and will welcome a
    wider acceptance of usb (let's get those prices down) soon.

    I, however, don't see myself using something like that for a few years yet....

    RANT!!!!!




    Am I the only person out there that refuses to buy a damn
    celery or p-II p-III system because they don't have any
    freakin boards that DON'T use that atrocity called
    PS/2 ???

    KILL IT!!!! What kind of a freakin moron came up with the idea
    of an architecture that REQUIRES a freakin REBOOT when the device
    comes unplugged??

    I LOVE the fact (with my old AT style keyboard) that I can unplug
    EVERYTHING from my server after setup... and....
    if I ever (god forbid) HAVE to physically sit on it for something
    I can't do over the network... I can just plug in my keyboard
    monitor and SERIAL mouse (if necessary) and go to work.

    Hello!!! Isn't there ANYONE else out there that agrees
    that PS/2 must die?

    End Rant... *sigh*
    Thanx a whole freakin lot ibm... and thanx to the idiots
    in the industry for continuing retarded architecture.

  • ...Intel just wont support it
    For the moment Firewire seems to be relegated to Macs, Sony laptops and people willing to buy expensive Adaptec (or similar) cards. Intel simply arent interested in Firewire because they believe USB2 will support higer speeds and remain backwards compatible.

    I see this as a bit of a shame - Firewire is a good system - it can act peer to peer without needing hubs which USB can not manage. It's being adapted by alot of domestic AV equipment manufacturers - we're starting to see DV decks with Firewire in/out - couple a Digicam and an iMacDV to one of thses and you have amazing picture quality and a nice looking PC to boot.

    Personally I dont think that the domestic PC market would be worried about having 2 different busses for use externally - after all we've survived having 2 legacy keyboard connectors 2 (3 if you count the old busports models) different mouse connectors, 2 ize serial sockets, seperate printer sockets and as many SCSI connectors as you can shake a very big stick at - as long as connector A doesn't plug into connector B the consumer will be happy.

  • Ugh, yet again, as much as I hate it, Mr Gates's Platform is going to be quite a defining factor in the future of these technologies. I work for an OEM and always like to keep up with whats going on technology wise (even though we are a WinTel only OEM) and looking at Windows Millenium proves that ISA and other legacy standards surely have to die a death, not that long after the product is released. From what I can see, the only difference in Windoze Millenium (apart from more pointless gui touchups and changed icons) is the removal of all legacy driver support and access to true DOS at bootup. Mainstream OEM's work to the guidelines that MS and Intel set out, they have very little choice but to follow the rest of the herd as Joe 6Pack wants a PC with the Intel Logo and Windows Flag. One day this may well change (for the better) but for now Linux is doing a good job at catch up, so I dont feel we have much to worry about with regards to lack of support from the OS.
  • Yep, almost all DV cams (including my Panasonic) have Firewire. They've never had USB !

    Problems is, I've yet to see motherboards with support for Firewire. (except the iMac junk).

    And as long as it's only video cams that uses Firewire, we won't see any either.

  • There's nothing wrong with FDD and Serial. I know whole companies that are not upgrading their Macs simply because they require floppy drives. Floppy drives are useful. They are a universal standard for transportable data. A text file on a floppy can easily be read on Sparc, Intel, Mac, SGI and most other hardware you care to mention. Sneakernet is a useful out-of-band comms system for use when the network is down or not there.

    Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.

    Removing floppy drives from computers because they have USB and Ethernet is about as smart as removing the staircase from a 20 story building because it's got plenty of lifts in.

  • Not to deride USB or anything, but it looks like its starting to become a gimmick rather than a possible hardware solution.

    Yes, USB needs to be marketed by all the industry giants so it can undergo price cuts in respective hardware and get a real chance in the market. But the primary marketing point of a PC shouldnt be that it is USB exclusive. Just cause Apple got lucky with the IMAC (though that was more of an image thing) doesn't mean every vendor out there should be trying to shove his own legacy free rig in the marketplace. "Sure we used outdated, low-quality components and configured them poorly, but IT'S LEGACY FREE!" Look at Apple's original Imac for example: outdated graphics card, lack of writable media, limited RAM... they were clearly wrapped up in product image while ignoring major hardware features. Obviously companies should care more about installing quality hardware and giving customers a wide range of hardware and software options than about whether or not their boxes are perfectly legacy-free.

    Also, legacy free pc's bring up a more important issue: lack of choice. Granted USB has so far proven sucessful in the area of scanners, digital cameras, and other peripherals... but that doesn't mean USB should become the sole medium for periphals as a whole. I don't see why ps/2 needs to be replaced urgently... as my old mice and keyboards always worked fine. Plus even if the new rig doesn't come with any compatible periphs, I think ISA and PCI slots should be available should the user feel like adding something (perhaps an old modem, I dunno). Then theres the whole USB/non-windows OS deal. I hear USB is coming closer to full compatibility with Linux, but I still see the normal share of competent Linux using netizens who can't get some USB device set up properly. Of course there's also other Os's, such as BeOS, of which I have no idea how much compatibility with USB is there. But I think it is clear that USB was designed with mostly Windows in mind. And of course this could reduce the number of future non-windows users if all the budding Linux newbies found USB conflicts on their new legacy free boxes and returned to Windows in annoyed frustration.

    Bottom line: As good as USB may be, it shouldn't be employed as a giant marketing strategy, nor should it be forced on everyone. If it truly possesses the merits acredited to it, USB will suceed eventually.
  • Can DOS handle USB?
    My main system is DR-DOS 7.03 and Linux. Wonder
    if DOS will be able to use any USB devices..
  • I hot swap PS2 devices frequently.

    AFAIK the only difference betweeen an AT keyboard connector and a PS2 keyboard is the connector.

    The PS2 mouse is moderately different tho.
  • [g33k@sliver:~]$ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 0: 3195058 2881352 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 29332 29516 IO-APIC-edge keyboard 2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade 3: 1456 1678 IO-APIC-edge serial 8: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc 12: 78010 100546 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse 13: 1 0 XT-PIC fpu 14: 17934 30048 IO-APIC-edge ide0 15: 11 23 IO-APIC-edge ide1 16: 1633492 2013057 IO-APIC-level bttv 17: 21 23 IO-APIC-level aic7xxx 18: 98737 100496 IO-APIC-level eth0 19: 0 0 IO-APIC-level es1370
  • You won't see a major shift in motherboard design until both of these factors are at least moderately better with a non-legacy system.

    Right now (yes I realize this is a big generalization) - MOST ISA cards cost less than the equivalent PCI card. Likewise, ISA does not incur much of a performance hit with many of the peripherals. For example, sound cards, 10 MBps network cards, and modems / other serial devices will all work fine in an ISA slot.

    Speaking of modems, I believe there was a recent discussion on Slashdot about them. There was note of the fact that few, if any PCI modems are made that are not Winmodems. So if you're rigging up an all PCI system with one of those, are you really gaining performance? I doubt it.

    So in order to maintain what amounts to a marginal performance boost, you're going to use an external modem. This is, once again, more expensive, which goes back to my initial point.

    I can think of much better ways to improve my system performance for the same amount of money.

    Best regards,

    SEAL
  • argh. sorry about that. Point was that with the abit bp6 you get 24 irq's.
  • Actually, the ES1370/1 line of PCI sound cards (Ensoniq AudioPCI / AudioPCI 97 & Creative SB 16 PCI) are extremely nice with Linux. You get dual DSPs (one full-duplex record/play, one play only), they are very well supported, and you don't have to deal with jumpers / soft-settable / ISA PnP to get it working. Just drop in the board and compile drivers - or insmod them if your distro is built that way. Dunno about PCI modems. Heard that the Diamond PCI modems are nice, but I haven't had a chance to try one in Linux. Matters not to me anyways, DSL is cheap and readily available in my area.
  • I heard that despite the USB style connector 'USB' keyboards are still PS2 underneath and the USB controller on the mobo emulates a PS2 controller.

    Anyone know if I was hallucinating?
  • and as a result no more IRQs, or IO ports or.... hooray!

    Just boxes on your desktop hooked together with USB or firewire .... that hot plug .... usb/firewire disks, cameras, (firewire) video cards, net connections, sound cards (usb/firewire speakers really), kbds, joysticks, ..... a brave new world - I can't wait 'till ISA is dead!

    Last time I checked firewire's pretty close in speed to a backplane bus anyway - for a low end box why not get rid of all that empty space, slots etc - if you do that and only have external connections then you can build smaller form factor cases, get away from standard sized MBs. With no holes for cards you can do cheaper FCC (meaning cheaper MBs and cases). etc etc

    With the push to much cheaper PCs this sort of thing is going to happen - even if it saves $10 on the production price to someone who's making 1M boxes/year that's $10M.

  • The local internet gaming cafe has the same problem. (they're running windoze, though they wish they didn't)

    Keyboards that come unplugged never work when plugged back in a running machine.

    Mice don't either....


    What difference does windoze make? None that I can see.

    It still grabs a specific IRQ... often times an irq that's
    also hardwired by some not so bright pci board manufacturers...

    Can anyone shed some light on this ps/2 workee, no workee deal?
  • Without IRQs, the os has to sit there polling the hardware to see if it's finished: not good for performance. Rather than getting rid of IRQs, what you really want to do is increase the number of available IRQs (NOTE: I may be off track here, as well designed IRQ sharing might not be a bad thing).

    As to your other points: in general, I would agree, but there are times when at least serial ports are useful (though not to the average user). The rest? What for? I rather like ethernet printers:).

  • Its seems from the article that Compaq is releasing the Vista, although it says in the slashdot jib that Dell making it. Did I read something wrong? Are one of these sources wrong? Hmmm.. Bortbox
  • They have been working up to this for a couple of years now and I beleive the big push will be in the coming year. This is more aimed at building ISA-less systems with all the legacy devices gone. This means no ISA interrupt controller, FD controller, KBD controller, serial, parallel etc etc, no VGA compatable frame buffer

    PCI/AGP and USB are the big winners here and I expect will be the main stream for the next few years. Low end machines will probably do without PCI slots (but will have a PCI bus between the chips on the motherboard).

  • It is not really a good idea to hot-swap either AT or PS/2 keyboards as they were not designed with that in mind. There is 5 volts of power flowing through both types of keyboard connectors. While you may get away with connecting and disconnecting the keyboard (either type) with success some of the time, you'll eventually zap your hardware! [A friend of mine used to hot swap AT keyboards all the time until it killed both his keyboard AND his motherboard.]

  • Re:USB (Score:1)

    by Gid1 ( 23642 )
    I'd like to see some progression on IEEE-1355.. I dunno offhand what the status of work on 1355 is, but it's a far more exciting technology than either USB or IEEE-1394.

    It's faster, and fully routed.

  • I believe there was a recent discussion on Slashdot about them. There was note of the fact that few, if any PCI modems are made that are not Winmodems


    Uh there are HEAPS of PCI modems which aren't 'winmodems' (meaning software based dsp).

    However, PCI modems obviously require special drivers.

  • One more step away... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Once more computers take a step away from the hobbyist developer.

    Once, if you wanted to program anything more than the simplest stuff, you learnt assembly. Then along came Intel's hideously complex assembly language and that went out of the window. The speed of computers today has taken some of the sting out of this however

    The ISA slot for all it's naive simplicity was exactly that, simple. I designed and created an analogue-to-digital card for the ISA slot in little over a week (part time for degree project). Where is the place for this kind of stuff with PCI/USB/Firewire? Where does the home hobbyist plug in their projects?

    I guess I'm not really complaining. Things progress and change and legacy hardware really isn't much excuse to keep a standard going for more than a few years. I just think it's a shame. I guess I hark back to the halcyon days of 8-bit computing where everything was laid bare, (home) computers booted straight into their programming language, machine code just meant a few pokes and the bus lines usually poked out of the back of the case to plug things into. After all, isn't it on this kind of hardware where most current software engineers cut their teeth? It's certainly often quoted for the high degree of computer literacy in the UK. I just worry about the growing tendency to insulate users from what a computer really is. After all, someone has to develop the hardware and write the software of tomorrow.

    I'm probably just getting old.

    Rich

  • Consider too, the iMac would be a natural for firewire but Apple doesn't ship iMac with firewire.

    The current base model iMac doesn't have FireWire, but the DV and DV SE models both ship with dual FireWire ports.
  • When Windows goes into Safe Mode, it does not load any "unecessary" drivers--including USB! So everyone that goes out and buys these USB-only motherboards are going to have a *lot* of fun. How on earth do you manipulate a computer without a keyboard or a mouse? (Another example of Microsoft brilliance!)

    Here's a tip to all Windows support techs: Carry your own keyboard and mouse from now on!
  • Most of the peripherals we now take for granted (sound, 3D graphics, SCSI, etc.) started out as expansion boards. Closing the mainstream PC architecture will destroy the market for such expansion boards, even if a few high end machines keep a bus. On the other hand, PCI isn't really all that fast anymroe anyway, so something had to change.

    I think a priori, this is not a good change as far as hardware is concerned. But something good may yet come from it: the bottleneck that going to USB and FireWire for expansion causes may finally propel the PC industry towards a more distributed and parallel architecture. In a USB/FireWire-only world, a novel piece of 3D graphics simply has to include its own general purpose processor that handles communications back to the PC.

    Whatever its effect on hardware, this should be great news for Linux and other non-Microsoft operating systems. It looks to me that drivers for USB and FireWire-based devices ought to port much more easily between different operating systems. Many of them can actually even run in user mode. Configuration and resource allocation should also get simpler.

  • You're serious? Wow! As for USB dos drivers, I'd doubt it, although I'd be pleased to someone prove me wrong.

  • After the string of card changes the semi-nerd has had to go through it is unreasonable to think they will transition into USB. Sure it has it's benifits but will "Joe" go along? Heck he doesn't know USB from PCI from ISA from IRQ from RAM, forget about it's benifits, and he isn't in a hurry to find out. No, Joe is going with whatever he has when he opens the box. As for Mr. Nerd, it's cheaper and more useful (simultaneous use of burner and scanner for example) to have two computers linked in a network than to change to USB on your next upgrade---so what is thier incentive? Why cram 5 more devices through operating systems and chip speeds that cannot handle 3 or 4 operations at once as it is? Nerd or Not, most have made one or two upgrades since USB inception and have demonstrated virtually no interest in USB beyond that dictated by system manufacturers.
  • Interesting you bring up keyboards. I'm going off topic here, but if you have Win98 with a password on it, the USB devices used to get initialised after the password was entered, so if you had a USB keyboard, you couldn't type the password in, as it hadn't started yet.
  • My little Sony Vaio has a firewire port, and the damn thing is so small it's probably on the motherboard.
  • I got an iMac yesterday basically for simplicity. I'm a sotware nerd and I don't want to even think about hardware.

    My favourite thing about the USB connections on the side of my iMac is that it doesn't matter which one I plug the printer into and which one I plug the keybord into. It's all worked out for me.

    Ease of use comes from simplicity and consistency. This has been evident in the software world for a while, now it's time for hardware designers and builders to take the same ideas and make them a reality.


    ------------------------------------------------ -------

  • Re:USB (Score:1)

    by Psiren ( 6145 )
    oops.. thats near, not need. Too early in the morning damnit ;)
  • This is an aside, but did you know about bus noise on USB? I went and bought one of those spiffy Intellieye mice (hey I hate having to clean mice balls) and the damn thing creates quite a bit of noise. It's recommended (unoffically) that you don't put it on a hub, as it may interfere with other devices).
  • x86 asm hard?! the sheer suckfullness of it is what made it so damn easy to learn! I remember comming off of 6502 asm and giving x86 a go. "You mean I've got 4 general purpose registers and they're all 16 bits! Wow! and look at all these addressing modes and increment registers.. I'm in love!" Then I learnt 68k asm and the world changed.. then I learnt SPARC asm and wished it hadn't.
  • "On the other hand, PCI isn't really all that fast anymroe anyway, so something had to change"

    Well, On a Sun e450 the PCI bus is quoted at a 1GB/sec throughput, which seems pretty fast to me. Sure, there are buses out there that approach double this speed (used in SGI kit and such), but the low cost and wide acceptance of PCI makes it more useful.

  • at the risk of sounding like a numbnut what's the current status of USB2? support under linux? I've heard numbers that put this puppy miles ahead of firewire.. -- .. cheers
  • Do read the comments carefully. He didn't advocate getting rid of interrupts, he merely stated that almost all of the peripherals you'd be getting rid of in a 'legacy-free' system require an IRQ.

    Also, yes, interrupt sharing is a good idea, and, in a way, that's what a USB bus does. The USB controller requires one interrupt, but you can connect up to 127 devices to it.
  • Come on, this is getting ridiculous...
    People asking "Do we really need a K7 @ 700Mhz" I can understand (even if I think "Yes we do") but ISA? .... Do you know that if you've got a 100tx network with isa cards (if you can find them... did they even make them?) , the network's bandwidth would overload your dog-slow ISA?
    ISA is about as old a technology as can be found. Most PCI devices are cheap nowdays (sound, video and network cars.... you don't *have* to buy the latest TNT/SBLive/Gigabit ethernet card) so give me one good reason we shouldn't retire all our old machinery (which is starting to get *very* cranky) and buy new , not-top-of-the-line legacy-free machines.
    Less problems, more driver patches (don't forget: all this new found OEM driver support for Linux is for *new* hardware) cleaner kernels.




    No, I can't spell!
    -"Run to that wall until I tell you to stop"
    (tagadum,tagadum,tagadum .... *CRUNCH*)
    -"stop...."
  • USB works great, but I can get PS/2 keyboards and mice real cheap at secondhand computer stores... and as for PCI, that same store sells all ISA cards for $5 apiece - and compare store prices! Cheap PCI ethernet cards are usually $5-$10 more than cheap ISA... and I've never had any problems with isapnp... true, it may not be for people who just switched over from windows, but its still not hard to use if you know about PC hardware. I have to say I am sad to see ISA go... especially because it's more difficult to build a PCI card if you're just builting experimental cards to test stuff - and you can't just use an ISA test machine because the end users will use PCI! Oh well....
  • With the supposed 'death' of ISA comes PCI sound cards and PCI modems (ala WinModem.) Now perhaps I haven't been keeping score, but are WinModems working in Linux yet?

  • Re:USB2? (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    USB2 doesn't even exist yet as anything other than a piece of paper, and it is most definitely not miles ahead of Firewire. Consider that both USB and USB2 (when it's presumably available sometime in 2001) require hubs to connect multiple devices, and that USB2 has to remain compatible with both low and high speed USB peripherals, it's most likely going to be a real mess. And of course, by that time Firewire will have ramped its speed up to more than that of USB2 anyway, there's not really a lot of point in the whole thing, is there?
  • now of all things in the article this caught my attention most of all. no matter how fast computers get they still take forever to boot up. this is one of my biggest pet peeve with the pc architecture. there really is no reason it should take so long, I know alot of the time is spent in the 'isolation' phase of isa PNP (its rather heinous), is there other factors in legacy hardware that cause the horrible boot up times?
  • 100tx network with isa cards (if you can find them... did they even make them?)

    They did but not for long ;-)

    Overall this means something most people are missing - faster and cheaper mainboards. At the moment all the ISA wiring is putting quite a bit of design strain when you try to wire a good MB. With the ISA (and hopefully the bloody PCI/ISA bridge) gone the mainboard prices will go DOWN and speeds on local buses UP.

  • Problems is, I've yet to see motherboards with support for Firewire. (except the iMac junk).

    ASUS have a Firewire motherboard.

    www.asus.com [asus.com]
  • It actually has quite a bit to do with slow hardware.
    Hard drives are given time to warm up before being tested (unlike those old XTs.... I remember booting it up, giving it two minutes for warm-up, and then rebooting...)
    Plus PCs have a slow RAM and bus throughput (SGI had 2.3 Gb/s in 1993, here it is in 1999, and we're still dozens of times slower) and with more and more memory being installed in PCs, RAM checks are beginning to take forever.
  • (NOTE: I may be off track here, as well designed IRQ sharing might not be a bad thing).

    PCI IRQ sharing is fine.

    However, you should realize that a manufacturer can have made the mistake of creating a device where the driver cannot easily determine whether this device caused the interrupt. As the device interrupts only say a hundred times per second, that's not considered a problem.

    Now you add a second card on that IRQ where that second card interrupts thousands of times per second, and you have a problem.

    Roger.
  • Removing floppy drives from computers because they have USB and Ethernet is about as smart as removing the staircase from a 20 story building because it's got plenty of lifts in.

    True. But I would rephrase it: "Removing removable media..."

    The trouble with floppies is that they are WAY too small for a lot of modern applications. Example: I'm an amature photographer. The average file size of a scanned negative is 20Mb. For ONE picture. Zip's are in use by the pro photographers I know, but 100Mb (250Mb for new) is rapidly becoming very small. CD-RW is too slow...

    Castlewood ORB anyone? Is there any Linux support?

    -
  • Changed to 25 cents after mucho bitching...article here ---> eetimes [eetimes.com]
  • Could all these boxes somehow chain their power supplies too, or would I need another three power
    strips in the corner of my apartment to fit a powerplug (or even god help me more AC adaptors) for each of them?

    Chris Morgan
  • After what I read about USB 2.0 I think USB can handle that in the future as well...

    Maybe one Standard (USB) is not that bad unlike 2 or 3 competing.

    Michael

  • I have to agree with that last post, I have a main design machine, running Win98SE, It was running WInNT4.0 (sp5) but the PCI modem(Rockwell HCF) I was using would lock the system randomly, so I swithed to plain vanilla mark one Win98, that experienced the same problem, but more frequently, allowing about 25/30 seconds on line before locking everything up for the night, and sometimes not letting the line go when I tried a reboot.

    Eventually got hold of a copy of SE and believe it or not got the same problems. I have since returned the modem card to the shop where I purchased it because it disn't fulfil the tasks it was supposed . Data communicatios processing

    Stuck in a 56k ISA rockwell ACF and everything is hunky dory. If Windows can't handle winmodems, what hope does Linux have?

    Skraggy

  • If companies are shipping USB-based hard drives, then I would agree that their developers are on something stronger than the legally-sanctioned mix of caffeine and pizza.

    If companies are developing USB-based hard drives, then that's perfectly reasonable; the upcoming USB 2.0 [usb.org] will raise the USB bus's bandwidth to around 50 megabytes/second, more than enough for a fast hard disk.

    I do find it amusing that USB 2.0 is aggressively pushed in the developers' section of the USB site [usb.org], but only mentioned in passing on the consumer side, and not mentioned at all in the consumer FAQ [usb.org]. We wouldn't want to give consumers reason to wait instead of rushing to the store for the current generation of products, would we? (On a less cynical note, USB 1 peripherals will work on the USB 2 bus, and USB 2 peripherals can be designed to fall back to USB 1 speeds; so if you're a masochist, you'll be able to hook that USB 2 hard drive up to your current USB ports, and blaze along at a breathtaking 1.5 megabytes per second. I can see the advertising now; "Get the power of a hard drive with the speed of CD-ROM!")

  • PCs usually implement a 33MHz, 32bit PCI bus, SUN-E450 also offers 66MHz and 64-bit PCI slots, which allows for 2x2=4 times as much bandwith (per PCI bus, the E450 has multiple). The only reason I can see why PCs don't implement these is because there is no need for them; the 33MHz/32bits PCI bus is fast enough for almost all applications (Except for video/3D cards, but they plug into the AGP bus, or the UPA bus on a E450). Until faster devices become commonplace for average Joe, I guess there is no need for a faster bus in average Joes machine.

  • Well, you're not completely lost in hallucination; but you're definitely fuzzy around the edges.

    There's no requirement at all that USB keyboards still implement the PS/2 stuff. Many of them do anyway; for example, the Microsoft Natural Keyboards can work as a USB and/or a PS/2 keyboard. But that's just so they can sell to the masses that still don't have USB, not because of any technical requirement.

    As for the motherboard emulating a PS/2 controller: Hardware-wise, this isn't true at all. Software-wise, many PCs with USB ports do have a BIOS with "legacy USB support", where the BIOS makes a USB keyboard appear to software as if it were an old-fashioned PS/2 keyboard. (Sometimes this support extends to USB mice as well.) This is done so that you can boot into MS-DOS and still have a working keyboard. But this is purely software-based, and can be disabled in the BIOS setup program.

  • Put a fairly feeble pice of equipment in a computer and hand out a (Windoze) driver for it. It worked sooo well for modems and now they want to make everything work like that.
    Is Micro$oft behind this?
    It looks like I might be keeping that K6-2/400 in my system for a long time!

  • I'm quite sure that the PC as we all know have its days counted. It will turn into a mass-market device quicker than anyone expects. And the big loser in this case will be "us" - I mean, geeks, nerds and hackers alike... The agenda is very simple. First kill all expansion slots, making preconfigured machines. The price of these preconfigured machines drop fast... and the price of the open-slot computers start to rise (less productio, higher costs). It'll take little time for a simple 'traditional' PC to cost more than a few thousand bucks... and the preconfigured one, less than $500.00. This is an unstoppable cycle.

    There are many reasons for this to happen. The hardware vendors want it - even Intel. Microsoft wants it, because it will make the current monopolistic discussions sound nonsense - there will be no software market as we know to discuss after all. Imagine millions of devices being sold in small shops with Windows CE preinstalled... MS will use it size to pressure electronics device makers, in order to force WindowsCE on everyone.

    The death of the PC is a very sorrow event for the OSS community, because it will make impossible - or impractical - to keep developing Linux. Close devices, closed specs, make impossible to develop drivers. Even worse - a home computer could be specifically designed to make it hard to change the operating system, keeping the user 'stuck' with the preinstalled one.

    I sincerely hope that this nightmare scenario do not happen. Many things can change. Maybe the market will not accept closed, unexpandable computers - this was tried before and failed after all. The business users may opt to keep using traditional PCs. Even best... if bigtime electronics manufacturers start using Linux on their PCs as an alternative to Microsoft...

    All I know is that we will see a lot of changes in the market in the next few years. In five yeras, both the PC and the Internet will barely resemble what we know today.

  • Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.

    I'll put in my word there as well. I don't know of many embedded controllers that use USB as their primary connection to a controller computer. Besides I don't think you have the same surge capibilities on USB that you can get on serial devices.

    I'm not sure on the spec, but in the Electrical utility industry you're not going to find many devices operating faster then 38,400 baud because of the surge requirements. The device I'm helping to design can do 57,600 but if you get more then 20 or so feet away with a serial cable it doesn't communicate reliably, the filters and MOVs round the edges of the signals.

    Running USB in that sort of enviroment would be almost impossible, unless you went out there with a USB to serial converter and hooked it onto the IEDs, but you certainly couldn't leave it there. And you can't use it for SCADA systems so you're still stuck with serial.

    I don't think removing serial ports from a computer is a good idea. I know they're trying to get rid of legacy devices in the PC, but that means they won't be able to support the legacy devices that aren't connected directly to the PC.

    Before you say 'you can just get a little box that has serial devices and can hook up to USB' I know you can. But I think those devices will become rarer and rarer as serial port modems and other similar devices become rarer themselves.
  • Obviously keyboards and mice wouldn't normally benefit from a faster interface (Ooh, I can type at up to 500 words per minute now!!!) but there is a benefit to the motherboard itself though. A computer is roughly divided into two busses and everything else hangs off of these busses. The front side bus is where you hang memory off of and is a high speed bus with very tightly controlled electrical characterisics.

    The peripheral bus is typically a PCI bus. Every other bus you see advertised is actually a chip which hangs off of this bus. More things hanging off means more capacitance as well as more electrical power. So parallel ports, serial ports, keyboard ports and mouse ports all have a cost associated with them. More capacitance means its more expensive to design a board that transmits signals at a given data rate. These chips also consume board real estate.

    So by building a 21st century motherboard that has less devices hanging off of the PCI bus would be a good thing. The USB port is responsible for more general purpose signalling at up to 12 mb/s: keyboards, mice, graphics tablets and maybe a floppy. The firewire port is better for high bandwidth applications without requiring a dedicated PCI card: video cameras, some forms of storage. A hard drive interface probably won't be going away any time soon as their bandwidth usage can be greater than FireWire.

    The FDD interface is unfortunately useful on Windows. I found out how useful when Windows decided it didn't like to operate this weekend. Since I didn't have a Windows Setup floppy I was forced reinstall. There may have been a way around it but since the only thing I use Windows for is occasionaly upgrading firmware I didn't lose anything except time.
  • >> >> yet to see motherboards with support
    >> >> for Firewire. (except the iMac junk).
    >>
    >>Why is the iMac firewire i/f junk in
    >>your opinion?

    Sorry, I should have been clearer.

    I wasn't just referring to the interface.

  • 3 comments:

    - As I see it, we dont need less IRQs, we need more! Sure you can share IRQs, but that means for any interrupt with multiple devices capable of generating it, you have to poll every one. With a single device per interrupt, theres no question of what generated it.

    - even if you dump the ISA bus, ive yet to see a motherboard (x86) that provides a way to use more than 4 interrupts for pci slots. One thing I really liked about having an isa modem was that I could assign it an IRQ, and still have the 4 pci expansion slot IRQs to play with. Makes a difference when youve got 5 pci devices already.

    - btw, can someone point me to some information on this claim that some X86 systems have more than 16 interrupts? Incidently, dont forget that not all interrupts are hardware interrupts (int 21h anyone?)
  • FireWire AFAIK. (Capitalisation is mine).
  • I came in the other direction:

    (6502 ->) Mot 680x0 -> x86

    After being used to the elegant orthogontality and linear addressing of the 680x0 world, x86 was quite a jolt!

  • Pleased? I'd be laughing my head off..
  • Most of these "legacy free" PCs run off of Intel's crippled 810 or 810e chipset. As far as I know, there's no X driver for the 810. So if you're cool with no Xwindows on these legacy free boxes, that's fine, but I'd first make sure they had either a BX chipset or a non-Intel chipset.
  • I have to laugh when I see "hot-swappable" listed as a compelling reason to "upgrade" to USB. Yeah? My COM ports have always been hot-swappable. I switch back in forth between my track ball and mouse all the time and I'm sure as *hell* not going to reboot for that. PS/2 was a bad idea.

    ("I've got an idea! Why don't we make the keyboard plug look *exactly* like the mouse plug! Now *that's* ease of use...." "Great! Then we'll make it so that your system crashes whenever accidentally unplug a periphereal. They'll *love* that!")

    ISA should definately die, and USB should probably take over as well, but software on the PC side is not to the point where we can make the USB plunge yet. Of course, it may take a drastic action such as this to *force* the software to come in line, but I pitty the poor users caught in the middle.

    ("Why can't I use my keyboard/mouse in safe mode? My display settings are messed up and I can't fix them! I'm stuck!" "This is a known issue with MS Windows, and will be addressed in the next service pack. Please wait patiently for your patch".)

    *shudder*
    --Lenny

  • Legacy Hardware (Score:5)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday November 09, 1999 @02:27AM (#1550589) Homepage Journal
    I'm all for ditching the legacy hardware as soon as possible, but...


    Why should a manufacturer eliminate the ISA slots in a computer? If you want to avoid using legacy systems, simply do so, but don't deny me the option!


    Here are, as I see it, the problems with doing away with the ISA slots as things stand today:

    1. PCI only allows you to have about 4-5 slots without adding a PCI-PCI bridge chip. My two PCI machines have no PCI slots left after:
      1. Video card
      2. 3D card (or two)
      3. Network card
      4. SCSI card
      5. Sound card

      In fact, my game machine MUST have an ISA sound card, since the dual V2's, video card, NIC and SCSI take up all 5 PCI slots. If it didn't have ISA, it wouldn't have sound!
    2. There are a lot of legacy devices out there that are either not going to be available on other busses or shall be so expensive as to not be worth considering. GPIB cards, EPROM burners, certain DSP development boards all come to mind (gosh, what do I do for a living?)
    3. It is a DAMN site easier to design and prototype an ISA card than a PCI card! Kiss the garage hobbyist goodbye when ISA dies.

    Now, I do want to address a couple of items I've seen mentioned in this thread about IRQs:
    1. First, getting rid of ISA doesn't measurably increase the number of IRQs an x86 machine has. When Intel designed the PC implementation of PCI, they (IMNSHO) screwed up by not putting in a dedicated interrupt controller for the PCI bus. So, even when ISA is dead, 15 IRQs will be the law of the land. Now, by sharing an IRQ among all your USB devices, and another IRQ among all your Firewire devices, and getting rid of COM1-4, LPT1-3, and the mouse, you might make a few more devices available, but unless you cut off all back-compatiblity, you cannot get rid of the keyboard IRQ or COM1.
    2. The fact that USB "doesn't use an interrupt" and therefor will require polling is false. USB uses an interrupt, and when a device changes state, it generates a message that causes a USB interrupt. So, you don't poll your USB keyboard/mouse/whatever. Ditto for Firewire.
    3. USB is too slow for disk drives: That would depend upon what you are using. Would I want to hook up a true hard drive to USB? Of course not! But would I hook a Jaz, Orb, or other removable up? The speeds on these devices are not that large compared to USB, especially USB 2.0 (400MBit/sec).

    The only thing about USB/Firewire/I2O etc. that worries me is the "You want drivers? Yer runnin' Winders ain'tcha?" mindset most HW venders have. As an embedded systems designer, I am CONSTANTLY telling these morons "No, I am NOT running Windows, I am running a real time OS, and I need the programming specs for that! No, I CANNOT use the BIOS you provide, I am running in protected mode and your BIOS only works in real mode. No, I am NOT running Windows, weren't you listening the first twelve times I told you that?"


    However, things are getting better with more HW vendors supporting Linux (therefor releasing source that I can adapt as needed to my needs).


    And before you ask, while I am considering using Linux in several projects I am designing, there are other places where it just doesn't make sense, and therefor I have to adapt drivers, not install the RPM. Let's not get into the mindset of "You want drivers? Yer running Linux ain'tcha?" ;^)

    PS: Rob, why don't you put a "Spellcheck" button on the post page? It would sure help us all out!

  • I have many cards which exist only in ISA form. Perhaps the best-loved is my Roland LAPC-1 - easily still the best soundcard for sampled sounds and MIDI, for all that it's ancient.

    Personaly, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft pushed USB for all it's worth, to keep Linux out of competition for just a little bit longer, ensuring the standards and specs change just enough each version to break the Linux drivers.

    Is it -really- the best way to go, to burn ALL the bridges, when in ogre territory?

  • USB and FireWire (IEEE-1394) aren't competing standards - at least they weren't designed to be. USB is designed for low bandwidth devices, FireWire for high bandwidth, with not a lot of overlap. USB is not offically a standard at all, in that the definition is still under the control of Intel. I'm not saying that USB is bad - but it is optimised for low bandwidth, right down to having cheap cables.

    Then Intel gets this idea that they can have the whole pie to themselves (talk about a bob each way - they are part of the IEEE-1394 consortium too), so they bring on this USB 2.0 vaporware - the _specification_ due in a maybe a few months specifies something that maybe will (under ideal conditions) have a similar speed to that available with FireWire _now_.

    There is an excellent article on this at:

    http://www.MacKiDo.com/Hardware/USB2.html

    Read that article if you think that USB 2 will be as good as FireWire.

    If USB 2.0 succeeds, it will be on Intel marketing power, not technical merit.

    OTOH, that hasn't stopped inferior techology before. I'm writing this on a G3 macintosh with EIDE drives, when EIDE ousted SCSI _not_ because it was in any real way better, but because the fact that it is the 'standard' in PCs made the drives a lot cheaper. I hope we don't also get the 'nearly good enough' technology of USB 2.0 in a similar way.

    Roy Ward
  • Sure, it's "free" when you buy a new PC, but a cheap, no-frills PCI Firewire board is $150. At that price, I imagine it'll be a while until we see support for it in Linux. Who's gonna go out and buy a card, and then a $1500 DV camera (or a $700 Firewire hard drive) to start hacking in support in Linux?

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Yes, you're right. IRQ's are good, but they have to be done right ro be good. What do I mean? I mean auto-configuring IRQ's, such that there are no conflicts but the user never has to worry about configuring them.

    By the way, Macs have done that for years. I see no advantage to hand-configuring them; more than a handful of PC magazines have even commented that Apple did it right. I wonder why the PC industry has yet to catch up.

  • Re:Legacy Hardware (Score:3)

    by Tiroth ( 95112 ) on Tuesday November 09, 1999 @04:16AM (#1550640) Homepage
    I would get rid of ISA in a second. Here's why:

    -ISA cards don't share IRQs. That means that even with a constant number of IRQs, replacing an ISA card with a PCI generally means more free IRQs, and less conflicts.

    -ISA cards (as we've all noticed) don't do PnP worth crap. It's also not always possible to tell what the IRQ/DMA/IO settings are for a given card...they often don't listen to the BIOS when in PnP mode.

    -ISA cards are harder to troubleshoot on a system. Believe me, I service computers. I hate ISA cards.

    -less ISA slots means more room for PCI slots. Even if these are bridged, it's still a good thing. More slots mean more support for _current_, as opposed to old (legacy) hardware.

    -finally, moving from ISA provides more encouragement for designers to take advantage of the more capable bus.

    As far as the maturity of Firewire and USB, their time is coming, but I'm skeptical of their ability to replace basic hardware like mice and keyboards. I'm certainly not going to go buy half a dozen keyboards and mice to get the same functionality I currently have, and end up with less USB ports to boot.
  • Not to mention that although an SLI V2 setup has a decent fillrate, it completely lacks any sort of rendering quality and has none of the rendering features which have been in OpenGL for ages and are going to start showing up soon, such as stencil effects (VERY useful for shadows and CSG-based modelling, among other things). Do yourself a favor and get a TNT2 or G400 and free up two of your PCI slots and make your 3D less kludgy. :) (Yeah, I know, 3dfx cards are the only ones which can do 'decent' hardware 3D under Linux right now. It's changing quickly, and in the meantime, with a TNT or TNT 2 you can always run nVidia's unstable GLX driver, which really works quite well.)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • Personaly, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft pushed USB for all it's worth, to keep Linux out of competition for just a little bit longer

    Except that Linux has better USB support than Windows NT, which will have absolutely no support until next year some time. The biggest victim of MS/Intel's "PC99" push has been Microsoft, because it's limited the adoption of WinNT workstation (which is twice the price of 98). Hope that ends the conspiracy theory.
    --
  • The PCI soundcards that you mentioned are OBJETIVELY no better to the Human Ear, since a good 16-bit soundcard can produce two sounds that are separated by so little that the ear treats them as the same (either in duration, tone, or volume).

    1 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kBytes/s.
    8 channel of CD quality audio = 150 kbits/s

    Yeah, you could mix the audio in software. What if you now want to put different DSP effects on the channels? (3d sound?) You want to do that on the main processor too. Sound cards are progressing the same way video cards have. They're not as high-profile, because a lot of people don't care, however. A PCI sound card does make some sense.

    Show me the typist that can type over 1000 cpm, so I guess that 9600 baud serial keyboard is gonna last a while. The reason we shouldn't scrap all legacy hardware is there is a good portion of it that exeeds it's design specifiations to this day.

    Bandwidth are not the only reasons to use a USB or PCI device. They are also allow for more flexible/easy configuration. ISA sucks for plug-n-play - even ISAPNP isn't great. USB keyboards let you put a bunch of them on the same system (if you're so inclined), and are more orthogonal (if you're using USB for other stuff as well).

    Relax, people will still make SOME motherboards with ISA slots as long as there are people like you to buy them. They will be (within a few years, I imagine) be more expensive (more logic, fewer produced), but you'll be able to get one if you refuse to use "bleeding-edge" technologies.

  • Wait until Sony starts including iLink (FireWire) on all of it's consumer electronic products - not just the Playstation, but TVs, DVD players, recievers. (Most Sony computers come with iLink too.)

    Perhaps then the applications will be more obvious, and we'll start to see greater adoption.
    --
  • Well, in a non-legacy solution you'd be ridding yourself of three PCI video cards for one AGP or one PCI solution.

    Your sound could very well be offloaded onto USB, as could your modem, if you use modems.

    SCSI can't yet be replaced by FireWire, I agree, since I use SCSI peripherals. But it's*almost* on parity, and much simpler. I do have FireWire, btw, because NT doesn't support USB!

    We may see network get shifted onto FireWire as well.

    So the only PCI solutions would be:

    SCSI
    Network

    Video AGP
    Sound USB

    Now that might not make you happy...


    -AS
  • I believe 3com's "Internet Gaming Modem" [3com.com] fits the bill.

    Also, external modems are pretty decent, although the UART on your standard motherboard may not be able to make the most of a compressed 56K connection.
  • so if you're a masochist, you'll be able to hook that USB 2 hard drive up to your current USB ports, and blaze along at a breathtaking 1.5 megabytes per second. I can see the advertising now; "Get the power of a hard drive with the speed of CD-ROM!"

    CD-ROMs aren't that slow anymore. You're talking 10x. Real nice CD-ROMs (such as kenwood trueX) go 43-70x (5-10 megabytes/s)


  • Not really. Firewire doesn't need Intel; it has the entire consumer electronics industry behind it. Plus Compaq, NEC, and Apple.

    Intel makes the most common PC chipsets - at least for intel based systems. It usually takes some time before Via et al catch up.

    If USB is integrated on the motherboard, and firewire requires a $20+ card, USB has a large advantage.
  • Why am I flamebait?

    -AS
  • > Will some day Alan Cox and Linus say yes to Devfs so I can know with more accuracy where to find my USB, SCSI and Fire Wire devices without the need to have 10 000+ /dev nodes for every possible piece of hardware I can plug in my machine?

    What on *earth* do you need all of them present for? Detect device, MAKEDEV. Repeat. Perfectly automatable, and it's pretty much exactly what Solaris already does. I like the idea of devfs, I don't like the idea of having to tar it up to maintain state though.
  • I know for a fact that sharing IRQs on an ISA bus does not (usually?) work well at the hardware level! I once tried to do this when I had four serial ports (two on irq 4 and two on irq 3, ie the standard settings for 4 ports) and even though my serial port driver supported shared IRQs, it did not work well: I kept losing interrupts on the second port on that line. Adittedly, it may have been bugs in my code (for those interested, have a look at serio on my web page), but as it seemed intermittent, I think it was more likely the hardware. I don't know if this was a limitation of ISA or cheap boards.
  • Thanks for that, it's nice to know that IRQ sharing is possible on ISA (and that it probably wasn't my code's fault:). Hmm pretty easy to implenet a tri-state output IRQ: use a tri-state buffer with it's input tied to the IRQ level needed and have the board's local IRQ line drive the output enable of the buffer. That should do the job very nicely while allowing the IRQ level to be programmable (the buffer input can be tied to a register output rather than Vcc and Gnd or Vdd or Vss (did I get those right? it's been a while since I did any electronics, especially CMOS)).
  • There's actually room in most MBRs for 16 partitions (possibly more, I can't remember), but thats starting to cramp the code space a little. and then all the partition tools would have to be updated (do you beleive MS would update fdisk and dos to support 16 partitions?). Hmm, autodetecting a 16 partition MBR wouldn't be to hard: grovel around in the code section looking for where it loades the register (cx IIRC) with the number of partitions to scan and you're off. Hmm MBR signature checking, yummy (not).
  • >Apple demands one dollar per firewire chip in royalties.

    At least it's an honest, up-front charge. The "Intel tax" on USB2 is likely to be much higher, but hidden in things like increased motherboard/chipset prices. I'll gladly pay a buck for the difference between an IEEE standard and yet another Intel pseudo-standard, and I think most educated consumers would as well.
  • >Intel makes the most common PC chipsets

    How convenient for Intel, that they can hide the USB2 implementation cost in higher chipset prices (hint: more than the $0.25/device Apple et al are charging for 1394). Even if USB2 were technically superior to 1394 - which it's not - I'd be leery of adopting a "standard" controlled by a single manufacturer over one approved by IEEE. That goes double if the manufacturer is Intel.

    Maybe VIA or someone will integrate 1394 on their motherboards instead of USB2. That would be great.
  • >I'd like to see some progression on IEEE-1355.. I dunno offhand what the status of work on 1355 is, but it's a far more exciting technology than either USB or IEEE-1394.

    It sounds interesting, but I'm not convinced yet. How many nodes does it support on a simple loop/bus/whatever without added-cost routers/switches. How hot-pluggable is it? Does it support isochronous transfers?

    I have the feeling that 1355 may be a truly great thing...for another niche. It may be a mistake to push it as an alternative or replacement for 1394, just as it is/was a mistake to push USB - a perfectly wonderful thing in its own niche - the same way.
  • How convenient for Intel, that they can hide the USB2 implementation cost in higher chipset prices (hint: more than the $0.25/device Apple et al are charging for 1394).

    Am I mistaken in thinking that the $0.25/device is merely for the licensing? The cost of implementation is certainly more than that for both formats?
  • >Am I mistaken in thinking that the $0.25/device is merely for the licensing? The cost of implementation is certainly more than that for both formats? Yes, that is just the cost of licensing, and yes, the cost of implementation is more than that for both formats. However, the cost to implement presents an interesting tradeoff.
    • USB is based on a model of hosts polling devices. This allows for cheaper device implementations, because devices don't need to initiate transactions, but makes the host-side implementation more complex. It's a good fit when you have several dumb devices and the polling latency doesn't matter - mice, keyboards, stuff like that.
    • 1394 is more peer-to-peer, with devices able to initiate transactions independently. This makes device implementations more costly and host implementations less so. It's a good fit when you only have one or a few devices, when the polling latency matters, or when the device is connected to more than one machine.
    My point, besides the obvious complementary nature of the two approaches, is that Intel has a much higher market share in motherboard chipsets than in consumer electronics. Of course they're going to push the host-centric solution, because they can bury a lot more profits for themselves in the cost of a motherboard.

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