[HN Gopher] Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI c...
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Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector
Author : jnord
Score : 124 points
Date : 2024-05-18 23:37 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion on the original article [0] (61 points, 3 months ago,
| 39 comments)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39363479
| deeesstoronto wrote:
| Does anyone have any insights into the proprietary _graphics
| buses_ that were being created leading up to the VESA Local Bus
| (as referred to in the article)? I was not aware of anything
| between 16-bit ISA and the addition of VLB.
|
| Did any of these make it onto the market?
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, there was 32-bit EISA.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| There was no more satisfying home for an ESDI controller.
| sedatk wrote:
| Now that's a term I haven't heard for a long time.
| zdw wrote:
| Microchannel for IBM with their PS/2 line.
|
| There was also the VGA "feature connector" which was used
| sometimes for video capture, mpeg decoders, and so on:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_connector
| toast0 wrote:
| Well, VLB wasn't limited to graphics... it was just a fast bus.
| As opposed to the much later AGP that afaik, was graphics only.
|
| But, MicroChannel was IBM proprietary. I don't know if anybody
| else had enough market or enough full stack to make a
| proprietary bus viable; IBM was making graphics cards and
| motherboards (and cpus, sometimes), and selling enough units
| that it was worthwhile for add-in makers to support MCA.
| cperciva wrote:
| _VLB wasn 't limited to graphics... it was just a fast bus._
|
| VLB wasn't limited to graphics, but it had issues which made
| it difficult to use in other applications. Still, there were
| a handful of SCSI and Ethernet cards made to the standard.
|
| The physical size (Very Long Bus!) meant that it was best
| suited to cards which were already going to be large (e.g.
| graphics cards with lots of memory chips) and the tight
| coupling to the system memory bus meant that it was hard to
| use with anything other than an 80486 CPU -- which inherently
| discouraged its use for peripherals which weren't firmly
| aimed at the consumer market.
|
| Ultimately I think the story here is less "Intel undercut a
| standards process" and more "Intel realized that the
| standards process had produced a horrible design". We should
| be glad that they hedged their bets; PCI was far superior.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Intel Architecture Labs is responsible for essentially the
| entire I/O architecture of virtually all computers (not
| just x86) for the last ~three decades: USB, SATA, PCI and
| PCIe, plus PCI-for-Graphics (AGP). Notably all of these
| were largely developed in-house at Intel and then basically
| gifted more or less finished to standards bodies or Intel
| created an industry consortium around them.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| How much of that is because the tech was better versus
| because it was Intel pushing for it? There were competing
| standards such as (off the top of my head) SCSI (isn't
| that what SATA basically is anyway?), Firewire and PCIx.
| to11mtm wrote:
| > SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?), Ehh,
| ever since ATAPI, both old 'IDE' style as well as SATA
| hosts could use SCSI commands. The speed you get with a
| SATA cable, wire for wire, is a win over any SCSI cable
| I've ever seen, let alone the LVD vs HVD and everything
| else you had to worry about.
|
| >Firewire
|
| arguably had the right ideas at the wrong time; the extra
| power delivery is something we are finally now seeing in
| USB. However firewire was still relatively expensive.
|
| > PCIx
|
| PCI-X was still parallel with lots of data lines/etc
| which can cause it's own problems. Aside from having
| multiple cards potentially hamming each other up (PCI-
| Express this is less possible since it's point to point
| rather than shared lines) there is the challenge of the
| large number of traces and the difficulty in running them
| on a board as the signalling frequency scales up.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Wonder what made Intel keep its damn paws firmly on
| Thunderbolt up until the USB4 days. To this day it's
| still a truckload of issues/hacks to get old PCs upgraded
| with Thunderbolt 2/3 cards.
| jbit wrote:
| There were a few vendor-specific VLBish busses:
|
| Opti local bus was the most common, and had a few different
| boards: https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/tag/opti-
| local-bus/
|
| Gigabyte had one that was only used for the "GA-486US"
| motherboard. The connector was just two 16bit ISA cards back to
| back: https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/image/ga-486us-
| front-60b...
|
| I believe there were some others from different vendors.
|
| The signaling for all of these was pretty similar to VLB, since
| it was just the 486 bus on a connector.
| chasil wrote:
| There was NuBus, that did not have any adoption within i386. It
| was used by Apple and at least one Unix vendor.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus
|
| SPARC also had sbus, but this is likely later than your window.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBus
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Practically every Unix workstation had a different solution.
|
| Part of their performance lead was a proprietary bus that was
| much faster than ISA.
|
| Technically they weren't graphics busses but since scsi and
| networking were built in graphics cards were the only things
| that mattered when it came to the higher bandwidth. A typical
| Sun Sparcstation would have a graphics card and maybe a serial
| port card or something that didn't care about the bandwidth of
| SBUS.
|
| People completely forget this but from the late 80s to the
| mid-90s (when PCI started becoming widely available) if didn't
| want to shell out for a Unix workstation and you stuck a fast
| Radius or Supermac video card in your Macintosh II, your
| desktop publishing/graphics editing/visualization workflow
| experience was astronominfinitely better than on PC even if its
| 486 was faster than the 68020/68030 in your Mac. When PCI came
| out Apple immediately switched.
|
| Intel probably looked at NUBUS, SBUS, and all of the others and
| went "well shit if we don't do something about this the pentium
| won't matter because video cards will be stuck on either ISA or
| the jank-ass VLB".
| contingencies wrote:
| I seem to recall really damn long cards on some early PCs, maybe
| XTs, but searching Wikipedia only find 16 bit ISA and VLB (much
| later in 486 era). Am I hallucinating? Maybe on some server
| vendor stuff. Like SCSI or something? Some of them had
| proprietary daughterboards too.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| try "full length 8 bit ISA cards". Here's a transputer card
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/256438778055, memory and I/O cards
| were pretty common iirc
|
| edit: and video cards of course
| pdw wrote:
| Yeah, you don't even need to go that exotic. E.g. an IBM CGA
| card:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#/media/.
| ..
| h2odragon wrote:
| remember these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
| bloopernova wrote:
| And now hard disks plug directly into sockets on the
| motherboard. (Well, NVMe ones do)
| xgkickt wrote:
| The Performance Analyzer version of the PlayStation development
| board took up 3 ISA slots. Once PCI slots started to outnumber
| ISA slots we struggled to find motherboards for them.
| chasil wrote:
| I owned an S3 local bus card of this type. It was my first
| computer purchase after college graduation.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus
| montjoy wrote:
| I had something like this from a temp job that was liquidating
| old hardware. They were Northgate PCs and they had two extended
| 32-bit ISA slots that were giant memory cards. I'm pretty sure
| the platform was i386.
| Melatonic wrote:
| This comment for some reason made me think of some very long
| things that looked like card slots sorta but I believe took
| very long ribbon cables. Might be that ?
|
| No idea what they were
| blihp wrote:
| Yes, some of those early cards were monsters usually due to
| some combination of discrete 7400-series logic (i.e. economies
| of scale weren't there for most ASICs yet) and memory chips
| (individual DIP chips as SIMM/DIMM modules weren't a thing yet)
| in the 8086 and into the 80268 era. I remember issues with some
| of the early clones not having full length/height slots causing
| an issue with some of those cards. By the 386 era, those
| monster cards had _mostly_ died out on the desktop side at
| least (there were a few specialty cards that persisted into the
| late 80 's/early 90's probably before enough customers
| complained about not fitting in their new system.)
| Veliladon wrote:
| VLB was dumped because it was pretty shit. It wasn't going to
| survive past the 486 because it basically assumed, absent any
| other bridging logic, that it was connecting straight into the
| memory bus of a 486. You couldn't drive more than a couple of
| cards because electrically the situation was a dog's breakfast of
| a hack job and because the hack job was so bad if you put a hard
| drive controller on it you would be risking losing data and
| trashing your disk.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I have to believe VESA tacked VLB onto ISA to buy time.
|
| It was early in the IBM clone phase. Standardeers seemed to be
| catching up to the rate of progress and to how much
| time+resources were needed to craft a next gen bus.
| chasil wrote:
| It is a great personal career risk to push such sentiments up
| into management that have harmful impacts on other partner
| companies and/or internal projects.
|
| Intel's corporate culture specifically failed to do this with
| the Ittanium, where the technical failings were ignored.
|
| I guess the industry is lucky that Intel Architecture Labs was
| permitted greater freedom.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| don't remember those criticisms on Be's cpu port, which were
| mostly what you describe (well, didn't see much of the cpuport
| in any way now that i think about it)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder why graphics cards didn't jump from PCI directly to PCI
| express and used AGP between.
| twoodfin wrote:
| AGP (1997) was Intel's bridge technology between PCI (1992) and
| PCIe (2004).
| remlov wrote:
| That's the equivalent of saying we should have gone straight
| from black-and-white television to 4K HDR without color TV and
| HD in between.
| zoky wrote:
| AGP was released several years before PCIe specifically because
| the bandwidth needs of graphics cards were so high. PCI just
| couldn't keep up with the demands of 3D accelerators that were
| starting to come into widespread use. AGP increased bandwidth
| massively by providing direct access to system RAM, unlike PCI
| which had to go through the CPU.
|
| A better question might be why AGP didn't supplant PCI for
| _all_ devices rather than just graphics cards, and the answer
| is that since AGP was a port rather than a bus, it was
| impossible to put more than a single AGP slot on a motherboard.
|
| Once PCIe came along and was able to provide the bandwidth and
| DMA required for graphics cards, it simply replaced both PCI
| and AGP, rendering them both obsolete.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Isn't PCIe also a point-to-point connection instead of a bus?
| fleventynine wrote:
| Yes, but it has far fewer pins for the same bandwidth, so
| it's feasible to make a "PCIe switch" that will fit in a
| typical IC package.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Because there was no PCIe when AGP was developed, and the video
| cards being made needed something faster than the PCI bus while
| other consumer expansion cards did not.
| MisterTea wrote:
| AGP was a modified PCI bus making it a high speed point-to-
| point PCI connection. It was only ever intended to connect a
| single graphics controller so for years we had only one AGP
| port (They later hacked more than one slot/chip but PCIe
| thankfully happened). The idea was the higher bandwidth could
| allow the graphics chip to use main memory for graphics but
| that access was much much slower than the on-board RAM on the .
| Plus you know, your CPU and hence, OS And programs also needed
| to access that memory. I am pretty sure that idea was quickly
| abandoned after the i740 flopped.
| phire wrote:
| AGP is little more than a second PCI bus running at higher
| clock speeds.
|
| Because PCI was a shared bus, not only did the video card have
| to share bandwidth with every other card, but PCI ended up
| stuck at the original 33mhz speeds of the first version for
| compatibility reasons.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| The greatest thing that helped the thriving of PCs was
| standardization first driven by IBM and after that by Intel.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Micro Channel was the IBM choice that forked universes. I guess
| our PCI universe is okay.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I think it was Compaq reverse-engineering the IBM PC BIOS that
| lead to open standards on PCs (and clones).
| 1-6 wrote:
| Standards are meant to be broken, especially when they're based
| on outdated assumptions.
|
| I'm glad that Tesla is trying to do that with the 48V auxiliary
| (non-traction) battery. 48V is just below the Low Voltage
| threshold for human safety (NEC, NFPA). It's also 4X the 12V std
| and still a number cleanly divisible by 3V.
|
| Sometimes first principles design outshines industry standards
| especially when there are newer reasons.
| klysm wrote:
| Why does divisibility by 3 matter?
| spamizbad wrote:
| If I had to guess: common multiple of nominal voltage of a
| single battery cell (which is 1.5 to 3V)
| lttlrck wrote:
| Tesla didn't spearhead that though, in fact they were very
| late. It was initiated by German manufacturers in the early
| 2010's.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/48-volt_electrical_system
| 93po wrote:
| Audi has sold less than 10k cars total with a 48v system
| since 2018 and isn't even double digit percent of their total
| US sales. MB does better with a few hundred thousand since
| 2018. Tesla will be shipping a _couple million per year_. I
| think it 's still fair to say Tesla is spearheading the
| actual production of these cars, whenever it starts to happen
| for them.
| dwheeler wrote:
| > The peripherals didn't work across platforms. If you wanted to
| sell hardware in the 1980s, you were stuck building multiple
| versions of the same device.
|
| True, but in the late 70s and early 80s there was the S-100 bus.
| This was used by many systems and became an IEEE standard:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus
|
| However, it wasn't used by widely sold systems like the Apple ][
| and later IBM PC, so it faded away.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised, since they talk about all the other roots
| of modern protocols, that they don't mention that USB was heavily
| influenced by the Atari 8-bit SIO subsystem [1] according to its
| designer.
|
| It seems to ne there was quite a bit of cool ahead-of-it's-time
| technology in the Atari 8-bit range that went unnoticed because
| "it was just a games machine". SIO, with its universal bus
| interface and universal driver format, tied in with CIO
| (centralized input.output) that used the same driver/handler
| system for the keyboard and screen devices...
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If you've ever used a device with a USB or Bluetooth
| connection, you can thank Intel for that.
|
| Wasn't Apple a serious factor in getting both popular? I 'member
| Apple was the first one to seriously deploying USB for its
| keyboards and mice, whereas the rest of the world was stuck with
| PS/2 (and the fact it wasn't supposed to do hot-plugging) or,
| even worse, that horrible large DIN plug for keyboards. And I
| also 'member that Windows' USB stack situation was horrible up
| until Windows 2000, with USB sticks shipping with tiny little
| driver CDs that contained the manufacturer's implementation of an
| USB storage class driver for 98/ME.
|
| And IIRC they were also the first one to have a Bluetooth stack
| that didn't outright suck (it took Windows until W7 to ship with
| its own native BT stack, so every chipset vendor shipped their
| own package, with different feature sets and a host of
| interoperability issues).
| epcoa wrote:
| > Wasn't Apple a serious factor in getting both popular?
|
| I don't think so, especially for BT.
|
| > And IIRC they were also the first one to have a Bluetooth
| stack that didn't outright suck
|
| Bluetooth already was well adopted on non smart mobile phones
| (feature phones) and then cars primarily for headsets but also
| OBEX - (2002-2003) long before anyone cared much about desktop
| use for peripherals, let alone Apple. Apple had nothing to do
| with popularizing Bluetooth.
|
| For USB, it is more nuanced but I think usually overstated.
| Apple is still a minority in desktop marketshare, but in the
| 90s even though they were recovering with the iMac, they had
| basically come from the brink. I don't think they had the
| market pull people take for granted now.
|
| Intel and VIA were already sticking USB controllers into their
| Pentium/AMD chipsets "for free", the ports were inevitably
| showing up on every bargain basement Wintel PCs. The numbers
| just dwarf anything Apple was doing even if they adopted early.
| It's also not like Apple had market power to compel anybody
| like Microsoft to do anything like they would a few years
| later. (Further evidence would be the glut of cheap USB
| accessories in BRIC countries where Apple had essentially 0%
| market share in those days).
|
| A few years later Apple would make FireWire commonplace on a
| number of peripheral classes for a short while.
| burnte wrote:
| > Wasn't Apple a serious factor in getting both popular?
|
| USB was invented by Intel. Yes, Apple going all in on USB on
| the iMac was a huge push for USB which had still been
| languishing on the PC side, slowly adopted but poorly used.
| However, someone had to invent it. Bluetooth was more about
| Intel's influence, they weren't nearly as instrumental as they
| were with USB.
| ZWoz wrote:
| That article had weird statement about PCI-X: "It did not see
| wide use with PCs, likely because Intel chose not to give the
| technology its blessing, but was briefly utilized by the Power
| Macintosh G5 line of computers."
|
| I don't know, what they meant with blessing, but Intel server
| motherboards had PCI-X slots and this was common bus for
| servers/workstations. Mostly used by SCSI and RAID controllers,
| high-end network adapters.
| sillywalk wrote:
| The bit before it mentions it being designed for high-end
| workstations and servers, i.e. _not_ PCs, but I do agree that
| it seems to imply Intel never used it at all, rather than
| rather the standard wasn 't used in PCs (Intel or otherwise).
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