News Bit grabs ATI PCI-Express sneak peek

Funkatron.

Only slightly skewed. It is not 1bit & 16bit. It is 1x & 16x. 1x being capable of 5Gbits(not Bytes)/sec bidirectionally(2.5Gb/sec up & 2.5Gb/sec down) making a 16x PCI-Express capable of 80Gbits/sec of bandwidth.

 

cept mp3's need decoding by the cpu first

 

in principle i see what he's getting at but you're an evil pedantic ******* for pointing that out

wave files then??

or what about a soundcard that has hardware mp3 decoding onboard? The firmware is avaliable.

 

wouldn't the sound card need ide drivers too?

 

I knew I screwed something up >_<. I was too lazy to double check and all. Thanx for the correction. There is actually gonna be x1, x4, x8, and x16. If I'm reading this correctly, this will corrisponds to how many "lanes" the connection will have. Each lane is 200MB/s, so x16 would be a whooping 3.2Gbytes/s
Also, looks like external PCI-Express will pop up, which will be sweet. A direct line to the bus would be sweet. Here is a nice link

 

You can find out more about PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express at the following: www.pcisig.com

My understanding is that like the other evolving serial interfaces, HyperTransport, Infiniband, Ethernet, yadda yadda yadda...PCI Express is more scalable and simpler to implement. Serial interfaces can go a LOT faster than parallel (no skew effects between signal lines) Certainly, by being a switched interface, it would have more efficient bandwidth. Combine that with a packet oriented, peer to peer architecture. Basically, it's all converging to a "network" like architecture at all levels, from chip interfaces on up.

I wish the industry would go to the gastight connector used for VME and CompactPCI. MUCH more reliable. The current mechanical and electrical connector is inadequate IMHO.

Closes eyes and dreams of 3U CompactPCI Express with hot-pluggable Opteron-based CPU cards, etc..... Sighs.....

 

Because of its scalability, just think if they put more than one x16 connector on a mobo. Multi-video card/GPU goodness ala voodoo.

compactPCI?? wazzat?

 

wow i want it any one got any more pics

 

From what I read at intel's site when they replace all the slot's on the board and impliment pci express it consumes an additional 75w of power.

This combined with the fact that since the first announcement the speed has gotten steadly slower makes me think it will be a while for this one.

 

Why don't they put the hot parts on TOP of the card where they can cool better???

 

PCI-X is the same size as PCI. PCI cards fit in PCI-X slots. It is the same number of wires for a 64-bit slot. PCI-X is found in servers for performance reasons (the protocol is improved as well as faster speeds). Servers do not need graphics and therefore don't have an AGP slot. You only need 1 controller per slot if you want to run 133/266/533 PCI-X; you can have 2 slots per bus at 100MHz, or more at lower speeds.

PCI-express is a serial interface running 2.5Mbit/sec/lane raw data rate. Slots are x1, x2, x4, x8, x16. PCI-e x16 is the expected replacement for AGP-8X in workstations and desktops. It is expected to appear in servers also, and will be used for inter-chip comms as well as expansion buses.

Regards,
The Quantity,
server mobo designer.

 

By the way, if anyone is interested enough in this stuff to write an article on it, feel free to drop me a line.

 

This is a picture of a Tyan Thunder K8W, which handily features both PCI and PCI-X slots,



Now on the far left you have a PCI slot, the other four are PCI-X slots. Now unless you have very strange perception of the world those PCI-X slots are rather larger.

I'm afraid you have me on the wires as I cannot prove this, although to my mind a 64-bit PCI-X slot should have 2x the wires of a 32-bit PCI slot?

 

2x the DATA wires. Most of those traces aren't for data. (or at least many) Many of them are power and a couple may not even be used. So just because you go from 32-bit to 64-bit doesn't mean you have to double those power/unused lines...

 

No, it would probably just send a request to the southbridge, then the southbridge fetches.

Frikkin hell, it would probably need to address the ram and cpu too for the hell of it. Why not see if a webcam is present, just incase..

Pasters - id consider a carrier change if you think PCI-X is the same as PCI-E Who do u design mobos for??

NB: I refer to PCI-X as the server solution shown in the picture and PCI-E as PCI-Express.

Afaik its also scalable to 32x in the first revision iirc. No doubt theyll add to it in the future.

PCI-X needs another chipset for the "tunnel-I/O" or something like that, i dont know, i dont deal with server stuff.

My promise IDE card is compatible with 64bit/66mhz slots as well as 64bit/33mhz and 32bit/33mhz slots, so some are interchange. But it does require more traces etc. I *think* the whole bus will run as fast as the slowest devise as well, because of the p// nature, which as someone said above - doesnt happen in PCI-E because of the switch nature and each connects to the southbridge individually (no "classic bus" as such).


For all your PCI-E needs:

http://www.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/devnet/comms.htm

what is PCI Express?
PCI Express overview

And Videos!:

http://www.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/devnet/animations.htm

edit: those videos are well worth watching! They explain a LOT!

 

Well at least you followed proper ESD protocol, albeit in the powder room

 

I'm quite impressed at the number of new signings to the forums for this thread - welcome aboard, guys

Did we get frontpaged at a few places, then?

On topic: Will we be seeing desktop technology aligning itself more with server technology in the next few years, especially with the introduction of BTX and these higher-bandwidth card interfaces?

*n

 

Yeah on the [H]ard OCP 6th Edition back on the 21st of December.
This is a real Good thread.

 

More than likely - nothin mobo manufacturers like more than cross platform similarities - cuts costs.

PCI-E is designed to replace everything PCI i read.

 

The end of PCI-X confusion ^_^

You can't - at least not until Microsoft decides to implement support for PCI-E, which will probably not happen until longhorn...

In order to run at 133Mhz, you can only have one card per controller.
If you have two cards, it will run at 100Mhz, 3-4 cards, 66Mhz, 5+ cards, 33Mhz.
In the below image, we have 4 PCI-X slots, two at 133/100 and two at 100/66. The board also has Gbit ethernet. This is surely connected to the second PCI-X bus, thereby limiting the speed.

What noone has commented on is that Legacy PCI slots (33bit/33Mhz) are 5v, and PCI-X slots are 3.3v. They are keyed for this with the little part of the PCI connector.
For PCI-X you get 64 extra connections (count 'em)(~180 compared to ~120 for Legacy PCI). I have no idea how many of the 64 extra connections are actually used though

You can put a PCI-X card in a Legacy PCI slot and vice versa, provided it's keyed for the right voltage. A lot of cards these days are keyed for both 3.3 and 5v.