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To: timbur who wrote (12887)5/21/1999 4:05:00 PM
From: Scott Garee  Read Replies (1) of 16960
 
Although SUN uses PCI, each one of their devices gets a whole PCI bus to itself.

This doesn't sound right. We make supercomputers with PCI based IO and run 4 PCI slots per PCI bus with 2 PCI busses per IO channel. Not many PCI cards can saturate a PCI bus, so it isn't cost effective to have one slot per bus. Four Ultra SCSI controllers won't saturate a PCI bus.

PCI is a very nice IO architecture. It is the first commodity bus which we have found usable on our systems. The cost savings are tremendous. The number of devices to choose from is tremendous. Most vendors have a working Unix reference driver.

Note: most large systems already use 64 bit PCI running at 66MHz. PC's have fallen behind in this regard. The spec offers a lot more than the Intel chipsets are providing.

AGP is really a hack. Why have a single stupid non-standard slot on a system? It should have been incorporated into the PCI standard, just like 64 bit and 66MHz was. Then you could have multiple cards. I think multiple identical slightly more complex slots would have been just as cheap as adding a single non-standard specialty slot. Especially since we still haven't exceeded the capabilities of the PCI bus for graphics yet. We still haven't moved to 64 bit or 66 MHz on the PCI, so there is still room to grow. AGP should die, but it probably won't.
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