7 ms·

Expresscard was like a pci express version of PCMCIA? I didn't even know that existed.

paulmd 4y ago
ya it's like a 1-lane pcie 1.1 m.2 "cartridge" basically. Expresscard 2 gets you 1 lane of pcie 2.0. you can even use them to attach eGPUs... see the EXP GDC Beast lineup. Put a 6900XT on your vintage thinkpad laptop (there was recently a video of this with a desktop...) You can also play around with the M.2 slots on your desktop... those can be adapted to a pcie slot with a riser cable/PCB. Or I think there's little risers that use SAS to push it (needs a controller chip). Most PCIe is pretty fungible without much active conversion between the various physical formats, PCIe slots and OCP and m.2 and expresscard and oculink etc all are protocol-compatible and for some of them it's literally as simple as a PCB with some traces (like M.2 to PCIe and OCP to PCIe). Compared to USB and some of the other standards it's a massive success story imo.
- Sakos 4y ago
  I'm annoyed that we gave up on standardized modules like that. Especially now with modern technology, we could have far more modular systems that could last a whole lot longer than they used to.
  - resoluteteeth 4y ago
    I think it's understandable considering that 1) most people probably prefer smaller/thinner laptops now, and 2) between m.2 wifi cards and thunderbolt there probably isn't that much demand for it Still, pc cards were pretty cool
    - paulmd 4y ago
      thunderbolt is janky as fuck compared to pcie as a whole though. intel's tb3 is not great and nobody besides apple ever managed to pass official certification, which functionally requires bug-correctness apparently. hopefully it eventually gets straightened out with third-party usb4 implementations.
- bpye 4y ago
  > You can also play around with the M.2 slots on your desktop... those can be adapted to a pcie slot with a riser cable/PCB. I ended up doing this recently. I wanted to have a 10Gb NIC, a FireWire card (old negative scanner) and two GPUs. The PCIe slots are only 16/8/1/1 however, so to get both GPUs and the 10Gb NIC running at a reasonable speed I ended up getting a riser for the NIC as the M.2 slot had more lanes. It works.

ya it's like a 1-lane pcie 1.1 m.2 "cartridge" basically. Expresscard 2 gets you 1 lane of pcie 2.0. you can even use them to attach eGPUs... see the EXP GDC Beast lineup. Put a 6900XT on your vintage thinkpad laptop (there was recently a video of this with a desktop...) You can also play around with the M.2 slots on your desktop... those can be adapted to a pcie slot with a riser cable/PCB. Or I think there's little risers that use SAS to push it (needs a controller chip). Most PCIe is pretty fungible without much active conversion between the various physical formats, PCIe slots and OCP and m.2 and expresscard and oculink etc all are protocol-compatible and for some of them it's literally as simple as a PCB with some traces (like M.2 to PCIe and OCP to PCIe). Compared to USB and some of the other standards it's a massive success story imo.

Sakos 4y ago
I'm annoyed that we gave up on standardized modules like that. Especially now with modern technology, we could have far more modular systems that could last a whole lot longer than they used to.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  I think it's understandable considering that 1) most people probably prefer smaller/thinner laptops now, and 2) between m.2 wifi cards and thunderbolt there probably isn't that much demand for it Still, pc cards were pretty cool
  - paulmd 4y ago
    thunderbolt is janky as fuck compared to pcie as a whole though. intel's tb3 is not great and nobody besides apple ever managed to pass official certification, which functionally requires bug-correctness apparently. hopefully it eventually gets straightened out with third-party usb4 implementations.
bpye 4y ago
> You can also play around with the M.2 slots on your desktop... those can be adapted to a pcie slot with a riser cable/PCB. I ended up doing this recently. I wanted to have a 10Gb NIC, a FireWire card (old negative scanner) and two GPUs. The PCIe slots are only 16/8/1/1 however, so to get both GPUs and the 10Gb NIC running at a reasonable speed I ended up getting a riser for the NIC as the M.2 slot had more lanes. It works.