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Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector
- gnabgib 2y agoDiscussion on the original article [0] (61 points, 3 months ago, 39 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39363479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39363479
- deeesstoronto 2y agoDoes 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 2y agoYes, there was 32-bit EISA.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoThere was no more satisfying home for an ESDI controller.
- sedatk 2y agoNow that’s a term I haven’t heard for a long time.
- zdw 2y agoMicrochannel 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_connector
- toast0 2y agoWell, 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.
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoNote that AGP was initially basically just PCI 2.1, with the bus conflict resolution system ripped out, the connector flipped around and a few minimal tweaks. It could, in principle have been used for something other than a video card. The crucial part about it was that it was a dedicated link to one device. AGP was initially created not because PCI bandwidth was running out, but because PCI is a shared bus, and the kind of transfers video adapters liked to do played havoc with the system that negotiated who had right of way, resulting in all kinds of problems when other cards had to wait for their turn for much longer than their driver developers expected. The fact that it only ever connected one device to the host made it much easier to evolve, as future cards and hosts could just negotiate to do something different than what AGP 1.0 defined, if they found they both supported a faster version. When bandwidth demand rapidly rose with ever faster 3d accelerators, this was very beneficial.
- cperciva 2y agoVLB 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.
- jbit 2y agoThere 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/ 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-60b901d42a0c9105852865.jpg 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chasil 2y agoThere 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 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBus
- snakeyjake 2y agoPractically 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".
- ssl-3 2y agoIn the PC space, as a disjointed semi-chronological overlapping timeline: In the beginning, we had ISA. We had ISA because it was cheap enough for IBM's PC, not because it was good. MicroChannel was a thing, largely limited to IBM, starting in 1987. It worked well. EISA was a thing. It was not ever particularly common or cheap. It had 32-bit width and 8.33MHz bus speed, in 1989. EISA's main features were that it was solid, and that it was not MicroChannel. It was backwards-compatible with ISA cards. Then VLB happened. It was fast, 32-bit, was often flaky, and it was cheap. It was very popular for all kinds of PC accessories -- not just video cards. Then, of course: Everything performance-oriented shifted to 32-bit PCI almost overnight (including some things outside of the PC space). But there as also a time when we had PCI-X (which is absolutely not an abbreviation for PCI Express). PCI-X was 64-bits wide at up to 133MHz (though 66MHz was more typical). Like EISA, it never became common or cheap. And eventually, we had AGP -- but only for graphics. And there was also PCI-X 2.0, which was like the previous version was 64-bits wide, but it could operate at up to 533MHz. It was theoretically excellent, but essentially never really existed: Widespread PCI Express adoption was right around the corner by then. And now, of course: We have PCI Express, which we've been successfully flogging along in various incarnations for a couple of decades -- a damned eternity in computer years.
- contingencies 2y agoI 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 2y agotry "full length 8 bit ISA cards". Here's a transputer card https://www.ebay.com/itm/256438778055 https://www.ebay.com/itm/256438778055, memory and I/O cards were pretty common iirc edit: and video cards of course
- pdw 2y agoYeah, you don't even need to go that exotic. E.g. an IBM CGA card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#/media/File:IBM_Color_Graphics_Adapter.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#/media/...
- h2odragon 2y agoremember these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
- bloopernova 2y agoAnd now hard disks plug directly into sockets on the motherboard. (Well, NVMe ones do)
- mrguyorama 2y agoDisk On Module components for industrial computers have been doing this since we have had rewriteable non-volatile solid state memory.
- h2odragon 2y ago
- Veliladon 2y agoVLB 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoIt 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 2y agodon'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)
- duskwuff 2y agoAre you thinking of the "GeekPort"? That wasn't connected directly to the CPU - it was a bunch of digital (and a couple of analog) IOs, kind of like a cross between the PC parallel port and game port. The Amiga had a "CPU-port", but that was a much older and slower system.
- DeathArrow 2y agoI wonder why graphics cards didn't jump from PCI directly to PCI express and used AGP between.
- twoodfin 2y agoAGP (1997) was Intel’s bridge technology between PCI (1992) and PCIe (2004).
- remlov 2y agoThat'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.
- Eisenstein 2y agoBecause 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 2y agoAGP 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.
- zoky 2y agoAGP 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.
- DeathArrow 2y agoThe greatest thing that helped the thriving of PCs was standardization first driven by IBM and after that by Intel.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoMicro Channel was the IBM choice that forked universes. I guess our PCI universe is okay.
- flopsamjetsam 2y agoMCA always felt like a way for IBM to bring back control to itself to me. PCI was such a nice improvement to usability e.g. auto-IRQ assignment (no more jumpers), as well as speed and bus mastering.
- sillywalk 2y agoI think it was Compaq reverse-engineering the IBM PC BIOS that lead to open standards on PCs (and clones).
- 1-6 2y agoStandards 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 2y agoWhy does divisibility by 3 matter?
- spamizbad 2y agoIf I had to guess: common multiple of nominal voltage of a single battery cell (which is 1.5 to 3V)
- m463 2y agoMight be for transformers windings in vs windings out? I think transformers are pretty efficient, but convert voltage in multiples. I'm not an EE though and don't know if that is how electrical conversion is actually handled in cars.
- kogepathic 2y ago> transformers windings in vs windings out Transformers only apply to AC, where there is a fluctuating magnetic field. A transformer in a DC circuit is just a physically large (very low resistance) resistor. The standard practice to convert DC voltage (at least for these voltages) would be a buck converter, which is an active circuit. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_converter
- klysm 2y agoEven if it was AC, the ratio of the number of turns is what matters. I don’t see why 3 would matter there.
- 2y ago
- dwheeler 2y ago> 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 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.
- gregw2 2y agoNot to be confused with Sun Microsystems SBus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBus
- spacedcowboy 2y agoI’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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO
- glhaynes 2y agoThat's really interesting! I never owned an Atari 8-bit but reading about them now they sure seem like they were years ahead of their competitors in some important ways.
- mech422 2y agoI always loved the Commodore bus...simple, daisy chainable, standard connector, etc. I remember being quite disappointed by the initial PC hard drive controller cards..
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mschuster91 2y ago> 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 2y ago> 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoThat 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 2y agoThe 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).