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Ironically, VLB was based on the 486's local bus. Many people may know Intel also contributed to the initial USB standard, but they also created AC97, HD Audio

Ironically, VLB was based on the 486's local bus. Many people may know Intel also contributed to the initial USB standard, but they also created AC97, HD Audio, and AMR/CNR.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The article goes into that some. > To put that all another way, VESA came up with a slightly faster bus standard for the next generation of graphics cards, one just fast enough to meet the needs of 486 users. Intel came up with an interface designed to reshape the next decade of computing, one that it would even let its competitors use. It's crazy how useful PCI was. Intel kept being the company that made standards, that created places for cooperation. In an industry where historically it felt like every company wanted to take on the world solo. Its hard to think of a company that has done more to grow the pot in an industry than Intel. (Intel also created nvme!)
- crotchfire 3y ago
  > (Intel also created nvme!) To be fair they did that because there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk. PCI and PCIe were generous gifts from Intel to the rest of the industry and involved giving away a fair amount of hard-won development results (like the pcie serdes electrical parameters). NVMe was more a case of Intel being the referee because we needed somebody to make an arbitrary decision.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    > there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk. Are you confusing the protocol for the mechanical connector and form factor? Prior to using NVMe, Apple was using PCIe SSDs that spoke AHCI, the Intel-supported industry standard for storage controllers used by almost all SATA controllers. The M.2 card connector and form factor were standardized by PCI-SIG and are unrelated to NVMe.
    - alexdbird 3y ago
      As I understand it, speaking AHCI doesn't mean the higher level drivers exist in the BIOS to allow booting, so things were a long way from standardisation in those days. You couldn't just put an AHCI drive in an M.2 slot and expect to get on with your day.
      - wtallis 3y ago
        A PCIe SSD speaking AHCI means the boot firmware and OS will see it exactly the same way they would see an add-in card providing one SATA port populated with an SSD that is mysteriously faster than a 6Gbps SATA connection should allow. Those PCIe SSDs used AHCI exactly because that's what everything already had drivers for.
        jauntywundrkind 3y ago
        It's still grand that NVMe massively improved the world beyond "can it boot". Having 65536 different submission queues, having read/write opa take 1 rather than 6 round trips, and a variety of other improvements. I think we still would have been stuck with a bunch of vendors making exotic expensive boutique flash storage systems for a while had Intel not come by & made a fairly sizable overhaul of the existing protocols.
        wtallis 3y ago
        FYI, nobody supports 65k queues. The protocol allows it, but the hardware has lower limits. Most SSD controller vendors have had trouble supporting enough queues to assign one per CPU core on high-end systems contemporaneous with the SSDs.
        alexdbird 3y ago
        That's the thing, not everything had the drivers. Gigabyte in particular omitted the important bits for a while. I'm not going to claim I'm an expert, but I ended up with a very fast SSD which could only be made bootable by extracting parts of another vendors BIOS and creating a custom UEFI image with them added, and life is far too short for that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lakkal 3y ago
I briefly tried to use a motherboard with both PCI and VLB slots in the mid 90s. Didn't work well, though - constant machine crashes.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I wonder if the idea was bad, or just that the PCI+VLB boards tended to be last dregs of the 486 market, where the selling point was "The system integrator can clear out his cabinets of rapidly obsolescing VLB cards" or "the person in a weirdly budget-constrained upgrade can avoid replacing the VLB video card". They weren't competing for the premium market and probably cut other corners; this was after all the era of fake cache.
  - vrinsd 3y ago
    The PCI chipsets of this time were really really buggy, that's why. They got better as time went on but it really took a number of years before people could get reasonably high-performance, reliable PCI implementations. For x86, aside from AMD's Irongate (750/760) chipsets (K7-era) and nVidia (nForce), pretty much only Intel had PCI working reasonably. ALI, VIA and SiS PCI implementations always had weird issues and quirks. PCI-IDE adapters are another good example -- VIA's PCI IDE had all sorts of issues, if you wanted high performance PCI IDE, it worked best with Intel. It's not that different with modern PCIe-SATA either (history repeats), Marvell PCIe/SATA adapters have lingering oddities.
    - rasz 3y ago
      Wasnt Irongate build on licensed VIA chipset IP, and same deal with nForce being Acer/ALI/ULI?
      - vrinsd 3y ago
        No, Irongate was very much internally developed by AMD. AMD was well aware of the "sketchy" nature of ALI/VLI/ULI/SiS and knew it was giving them a really bad rep so they undertook their own designs. AMD chipsets were not as successful in the marketplace because unsurprisingly the AMD-chipsets cost more than the Taiwanese ones, and motherboard vendors (who are almost all based in Taiwan) stuck with their existing vendors. The dual-socket AMD machines (K7-based) pretty much all had the 760MPX on it because I think only AMD had a multi-socket chipset that was reliable. AMD also inhereted a lot of DEC engineers, so it was no surprise that K8-era their 'HyperTransport' was really 'Lighting Transport', developed at DEC. Interestingly, Micron had also developed a chipset for AMD in this era but never released it. nForce was also not re-licensed from ALI/ULI that I recall but I have far less insight here. nVidia at the time had a 'total system play' in mind so they were attempting to do GPU/audio/network/chipsets for AMD & Intel and got designed into original Xbox (x86-based). Jensen I think used NRE money from MSFT to fund a lot of the nVidia chipset work.

Ironically, VLB was based on the 486's local bus. Many people may know Intel also contributed to the initial USB standard, but they also created AC97, HD Audio, and AMR/CNR.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The article goes into that some. > To put that all another way, VESA came up with a slightly faster bus standard for the next generation of graphics cards, one just fast enough to meet the needs of 486 users. Intel came up with an interface designed to reshape the next decade of computing, one that it would even let its competitors use. It's crazy how useful PCI was. Intel kept being the company that made standards, that created places for cooperation. In an industry where historically it felt like every company wanted to take on the world solo. Its hard to think of a company that has done more to grow the pot in an industry than Intel. (Intel also created nvme!)

crotchfire 3y ago
> (Intel also created nvme!) To be fair they did that because there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk. PCI and PCIe were generous gifts from Intel to the rest of the industry and involved giving away a fair amount of hard-won development results (like the pcie serdes electrical parameters). NVMe was more a case of Intel being the referee because we needed somebody to make an arbitrary decision.
- wtallis 3y ago
  > there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk. Are you confusing the protocol for the mechanical connector and form factor? Prior to using NVMe, Apple was using PCIe SSDs that spoke AHCI, the Intel-supported industry standard for storage controllers used by almost all SATA controllers. The M.2 card connector and form factor were standardized by PCI-SIG and are unrelated to NVMe.
  - alexdbird 3y ago
    As I understand it, speaking AHCI doesn't mean the higher level drivers exist in the BIOS to allow booting, so things were a long way from standardisation in those days. You couldn't just put an AHCI drive in an M.2 slot and expect to get on with your day.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      A PCIe SSD speaking AHCI means the boot firmware and OS will see it exactly the same way they would see an add-in card providing one SATA port populated with an SSD that is mysteriously faster than a 6Gbps SATA connection should allow. Those PCIe SSDs used AHCI exactly because that's what everything already had drivers for.
      - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
        It's still grand that NVMe massively improved the world beyond "can it boot". Having 65536 different submission queues, having read/write opa take 1 rather than 6 round trips, and a variety of other improvements. I think we still would have been stuck with a bunch of vendors making exotic expensive boutique flash storage systems for a while had Intel not come by & made a fairly sizable overhaul of the existing protocols.
        wtallis 3y ago
        FYI, nobody supports 65k queues. The protocol allows it, but the hardware has lower limits. Most SSD controller vendors have had trouble supporting enough queues to assign one per CPU core on high-end systems contemporaneous with the SSDs.
      - alexdbird 3y ago
        That's the thing, not everything had the drivers. Gigabyte in particular omitted the important bits for a while. I'm not going to claim I'm an expert, but I ended up with a very fast SSD which could only be made bootable by extracting parts of another vendors BIOS and creating a custom UEFI image with them added, and life is far too short for that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lakkal 3y ago

I briefly tried to use a motherboard with both PCI and VLB slots in the mid 90s. Didn't work well, though - constant machine crashes.

hakfoo 3y ago
I wonder if the idea was bad, or just that the PCI+VLB boards tended to be last dregs of the 486 market, where the selling point was "The system integrator can clear out his cabinets of rapidly obsolescing VLB cards" or "the person in a weirdly budget-constrained upgrade can avoid replacing the VLB video card". They weren't competing for the premium market and probably cut other corners; this was after all the era of fake cache.
- vrinsd 3y ago
  The PCI chipsets of this time were really really buggy, that's why. They got better as time went on but it really took a number of years before people could get reasonably high-performance, reliable PCI implementations. For x86, aside from AMD's Irongate (750/760) chipsets (K7-era) and nVidia (nForce), pretty much only Intel had PCI working reasonably. ALI, VIA and SiS PCI implementations always had weird issues and quirks. PCI-IDE adapters are another good example -- VIA's PCI IDE had all sorts of issues, if you wanted high performance PCI IDE, it worked best with Intel. It's not that different with modern PCIe-SATA either (history repeats), Marvell PCIe/SATA adapters have lingering oddities.
  - rasz 3y ago
    Wasnt Irongate build on licensed VIA chipset IP, and same deal with nForce being Acer/ALI/ULI?
    - vrinsd 3y ago
      No, Irongate was very much internally developed by AMD. AMD was well aware of the "sketchy" nature of ALI/VLI/ULI/SiS and knew it was giving them a really bad rep so they undertook their own designs. AMD chipsets were not as successful in the marketplace because unsurprisingly the AMD-chipsets cost more than the Taiwanese ones, and motherboard vendors (who are almost all based in Taiwan) stuck with their existing vendors. The dual-socket AMD machines (K7-based) pretty much all had the 760MPX on it because I think only AMD had a multi-socket chipset that was reliable. AMD also inhereted a lot of DEC engineers, so it was no surprise that K8-era their 'HyperTransport' was really 'Lighting Transport', developed at DEC. Interestingly, Micron had also developed a chipset for AMD in this era but never released it. nForce was also not re-licensed from ALI/ULI that I recall but I have far less insight here. nVidia at the time had a 'total system play' in mind so they were attempting to do GPU/audio/network/chipsets for AMD & Intel and got designed into original Xbox (x86-based). Jensen I think used NRE money from MSFT to fund a lot of the nVidia chipset work.