The end of PCI?

While it is possible that PCI will be phased out by the majority of the motherboard manufacturers, I would not be surprised if a handful of them create a line of boards, or even just single model numbers, that will continue to utilize PCI.

Like what was already said by Jshay, a lot of audio cards use the PCI bus, and audiophiles are an incredibly picky bunch when it comes to which card they continue to use. Also, WiFi expansion cards are usually PCI, but only some have started the PCI-e migration.

Thanks for the link, it was a decent read.
 
PCI can't die fast enough. Same with IDE/Floppy/Parallel port/Serial Port/PS2/Parallel SCSI/PCI-X. AND old school BIOS. When is EFI going to be used more?
 
Ronbo said:
NIce little technical read, and some possible insight into the next generation of motherboard design. I remember when these funny, short white slots first appeared on my mohterboard, competing against EISA and VESA-LB to become the next standard :) Yeah, I'm old :D

http://www.semiapps.com/Is_It_Finally_The_End_of_PCI_.aspx
Click to expand...

And before EISA, VESA there was ISA! I wasn't old enough to remember what came before ISA. Probably serial ports?
 
PCI might last a few years longer, but as far as I'm concerned... floppy and IDE are dead. Asus agrees, 'cause last time I looked my P6X58D didn't have either... :D

9iveiv.jpg
 
Serial ports predate modern pc's, before IBM's introduction of the ISA bus, S-100 was the closest thing to a "bus standard" in pre IBM PC microcomputers.
 
Deviationer said:
PCI can't die fast enough. Same with IDE/Floppy/Parallel port/Serial Port/PS2/Parallel SCSI/PCI-X. AND old school BIOS. When is EFI going to be used more?
Click to expand...
Uhhh I'm pretty sure that PS2 is actually still kind of useful on keyboards if you want NKRO
 
Ronbo said:
That's what us old school guys said about ISA in the mid 90's! Seen a motherboard with a long black card slot lately? :D
Click to expand...

Yes, got a couple in the back myself. Not to mention it is rare, but there are some server motherboards out there still rocking with 1 or 2 ISA slots.
 
I wish PCI would die already as I want a MATX board with atleast two PCI-Express 1x and not one 1x 1 16x and two PCI
 
Matthew, are you sure those server boards don't have PCI-X slots instead? I remember when Abit introduced their first slot motherboards without a ISA slot. I had just shelled out about $$00 for a new BH-6, case, power supply (my first full ATX spec build) memory and that sweet sweet celeron 300A! It later served as my Operation Flashpoint server for a while.
 
I doubt PCI will be phased out for a while, as many peripherals still use PCI. Also, PCI-E expansion cards tend to be more expensive than PCI expansion cards. Until PCI-E cards gets lower in price compared to their PCI counterparts, I doubt we'll see PCI dropped anytime soon. We will see a few motherboards without PCI, but I think the majority will still have at least 1 or 2 PCI slots. One exception is the EVGA extreme motherboards, where all of the expansion slots are PCI-E x16.
 
Yeah, floppy is useless now when you can buy a small (but still thousands of times larger than floppy) USB flash drive for super-cheap.

IDE is pretty much on the way out, too. I've purged my rig of all IDE and my HTPC only has a small one as the OS drive.
 
Tsumi said:
I doubt PCI will be phased out for a while, as many peripherals still use PCI. Also, PCI-E expansion cards tend to be more expensive than PCI expansion cards. Until PCI-E cards gets lower in price compared to their PCI counterparts, I doubt we'll see PCI dropped anytime soon. We will see a few motherboards without PCI, but I think the majority will still have at least 1 or 2 PCI slots. One exception is the EVGA extreme motherboards, where all of the expansion slots are PCI-E x16.
Click to expand...

It should be pretty much the same as with ISA. A gradual decrease in the number of slots present on new mainboards. I have seen quite a few K7 boards with ISA slots, yet after that they get really rare. It will be mostly budget boards which have more PCI slots, while high-end (gaming) boards will forego PCI slots altogether.

Is there one type of expansion card which doesn't come in PCIe flavour yet?
 
Elledan said:
Is there one type of expansion card which doesn't come in PCIe flavour yet?
Click to expand...
I've even seen Parallel, printer, and ps/2 port adapter cards in PCIe 1x at my local microcenter. I think the only thing I haven't seen is a joystick/midi port in PCIe 1x.
 
It's easy for all of us to say that those should die but the huge majority of the world has systems that are way behind of what the people at [H] have. IDE and PCI will be around for a while. Not sure how much longer floppy will last though.
 
Ronbo said:
Matthew, are you sure those server boards don't have PCI-X slots instead? I remember when Abit introduced their first slot motherboards without a ISA slot. I had just shelled out about $$00 for a new BH-6, case, power supply (my first full ATX spec build) memory and that sweet sweet celeron 300A! It later served as my Operation Flashpoint server for a while.
Click to expand...

Positive, the board has all type of connections.

Heres a good example: http://superuser.com/questions/82009/isa-bus-on-newer-computers

and this http://www.taiwanpcsources.com/industrialmotherboard/index.htm

There are some Quad Processor server boards out there, I came across last time with 1 or 2 ISA slots. The boards aren't current tech, but shows that ISA support has not been binned.
 
Last edited:
Deviationer said:
PCI can't die fast enough. Same with IDE/Floppy/Parallel port/Serial Port/PS2/Parallel SCSI/PCI-X. AND old school BIOS. When is EFI going to be used more?
Click to expand...

Agreed. I can't wait for these things to go away.
 
Deviationer said:
PCI can't die fast enough. Same with IDE/Floppy/Parallel port/Serial Port/PS2/Parallel SCSI/PCI-X. AND old school BIOS. When is EFI going to be used more?
Click to expand...


thats because people are to hard headed and hate change.. and thus pci will continue to stick around for oem boards for a long time to come.. though they will most likely disappear completely on enthusiast boards in the next year or two..
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
thats because people are to hard headed and hate change.. and thus pci will continue to stick around for oem boards for a long time to come.. though they will most likely disappear completely on enthusiast boards in the next year or two..
Click to expand...

While I'll admit that IDE and FDDs are pretty much nearing the end of the road at this point, PCI-X has a lot of investments in the server market, which isn't a market which likes to throw out stuff which works just because there's something new.

COM is also used a lot, mostly among professionals and hobbyists who use MCUs. It's very easy to make an EEPROM programmer which uses COM. The USB version is very expensive and finicky in comparison. COM won't go away any time soon.

PS/2 will last for quite a while as it Just Works (tm), many people have PS/2 keyboards, mice and KVMs which they don't want to throw out while they still work.

The LPT (parallel) port on the other hand is pretty much dead already. I haven't even seen the headers for it on any new mainboard so I'm not sure why it was included in the list.
 
Parallel is still useful, for example, bit banging SPI.

Most USB-Parallel adapters don't allow bit level control. :(
 
Matthew Kane said:
They can't take out PCI, there are so many things out there that utilize this.
Click to expand...

And nothing in consumer level machines and most workstations that can't be had in PCI-Express. Hanging onto legacy PCI at this point makes no sense for 99% of us.

Ronbo said:
That's what us old school guys said about ISA in the mid 90's! Seen a motherboard with a long black card slot lately? :D
Click to expand...

Yes actually. There are still some specialty boards that have ISA slots so that specific and proprietary hardware can still be utilized. Again this market is a bit of a niche, but it does exist.

Matthew Kane said:
Yes, got a couple in the back myself. Not to mention it is rare, but there are some server motherboards out there still rocking with 1 or 2 ISA slots.
Click to expand...

Correct.

Ronbo said:
Matthew, are you sure those server boards don't have PCI-X slots instead? I remember when Abit introduced their first slot motherboards without a ISA slot. I had just shelled out about $$00 for a new BH-6, case, power supply (my first full ATX spec build) memory and that sweet sweet celeron 300A! It later served as my Operation Flashpoint server for a while.
Click to expand...

There are still boards that definitely use ISA slots. They are few and far between and you won't find them at your local Fry's or Microcenter.

Elledan said:
I'd like to see a backwards-compatible successor to the COM port :)
Click to expand...

Outside of some very specific usage scenarios, I don't think this is necessary. Certainly not on gaming and your average consumer boards.

Zoomer said:
Parallel is still useful, for example, bit banging SPI.

Most USB-Parallel adapters don't allow bit level control. :(
Click to expand...

Most people do not need this. I know I've NEVER needed that kind of functionality. I'd wager that 95% or better of all computer owners don't need that.
 
Dan_D said:
Outside of some very specific usage scenarios, I don't think this is necessary. Certainly not on gaming and your average consumer boards.

[..]

Most people do not need this. I know I've NEVER needed that kind of functionality. I'd wager that 95% or better of all computer owners don't need that.
Click to expand...

Oh certainly, but I'm pretty sure that us hardware developers/geeks would love it :)
 
About the only legacy port I care about is the parallel port. These old HP laser printers just won’t die.

USB is also far from a suitable replacement for the parallel port when it comes to controlling stepper or servo motors for precision automation. Maybe USB 3.0 will change this but for now the parallel port is still king.

I guess it really depends on your hobbies and interests but in my opinion the DIY pc automation of machines and fabrication of custom machines is a fast growing hobby. Stop by CNC Zone some time to take a glimpse at what has happened in the past 5 years or so.
 
I use a Laserjet 4M Plus to this day. However I have a Jet Direct card in mine and haven't needed a parallel port for it since 1998 when I purchased it. Personally I'd like to see stuff for niche markets like industrial automation and engineering be relegated to boards designed for those markets rather than being simply stuck on everything.
 
Ok, point proven to me on new boards with an ISA slot or 2 :D $600 for a S775 motherboard really makes that a niche market, however. And Dan is right about parallel port old school printers, heck if you really got desperate and didn't have a parallel port on your current motherboard you can buy usb to parallel adapters or find an old printer server box cheap and network it. I do remember when I bought that BH-6 that the web gurus talked about how using the ISA slot slowed down the computer via hogging resources and sharing interrupts! I think everyone missed one of the points of my original link, that pci support can be removed from chipsets because this company is making a chip that will use one PCI-e lane to support the PCI slot. Good discussion, everyone.
 
Oops, TGA I missed your post. That is the kind of CNC machinery I support, but mostly with '90's tech driving it. For real control of servo motors however, I built macines that used dedicated motion controllers made by companies like Galil, and servo amps and motors by companies like Pacific Scientific, often interfacing them with PLC's. That kind of stuff is way out of the budget of most experimenters, though. Yes, real parallel ports are needed for that kind of control, but many people have mentioned that there are PCI-e to parallel boards available.
 
I don't really see the haste to get rid of PCI making sense. PCI is handy...the ethernet port on a buddy's motherboard went out..in went a spare PCI network card. I have I think 2 in a drawer (of course, until last year I still had an ISA Etherlink III card in there).

There's tons of perfectly good PCI network cards, audio cards, USB 2.0 / firewire cards, etc all still floating around. I wouldn't buy a board without PCI ...why rebuy all of that kind of stuff in PCIe? A lot of it isn't outdated yet. Maybe if you like to spend money, you want nothing but PCIe...the rest of us, save a few bucks and keep the old PCI USB card or whatever.

Other stuff - like PS/2 - why get rid of it? It eats up so little space. Com ports? Still needed in corporate / legacy environments to connect to legacy equipment (I do VAX/VMS support and a little UNIX for a living...plenty of serial port console stuff). A lot of this stuff needs a serial port to get into the console...although I guess you can get a USB /com adapter for this.
 
Last edited:
GreenMonkey said:
although I guess you can get a USB /com adapter for this.
Click to expand...

Which would be fine if those @#$@ things would actually work 100% of the time like real serial ports.

COM is for serious stuff, USB to COM is for toys. Real plug'n'pray :p
 
I think that boards will always hang onto one or two full PCI slots for a few years more at least. Then it will slowly fade out as the majority of cards turn to PCI-E or something new.

It'll be like the ISA days when at the end, the final ISA slot shared resources with the final PCI slot.
 
PCI is not dead. Maybe in the Consumer class. Industrial / Embedded manufactures still have to support PCI, even ISA, even with new interations of CPU's. So it will always have its place. What is occurring, and has always occured between generation of busses, is an IC company makes a chip to bridge the old with the new. So your PCI-e1 devices may in fact just be a PCI device with a bridge chip. Or vice versus.
 
floppy is almost dead, I notice my new board has no port for it now. Also my main pc has no floppy drive already.

ide I think will survive for at least 3 more years and probably longer via 3rd party onboard controllers, same with pci. For the simple reason demand exists for them.

The problem with pci is things like x-fi cards are going to last for years, sound card progression is slow compared to other components. But whats bad about keeping pci slots in place anyway?
 
Ronbo said:
Ok, point proven to me on new boards with an ISA slot or 2 :D $600 for a S775 motherboard really makes that a niche market, however. And Dan is right about parallel port old school printers, heck if you really got desperate and didn't have a parallel port on your current motherboard you can buy usb to parallel adapters or find an old printer server box cheap and network it. I do remember when I bought that BH-6 that the web gurus talked about how using the ISA slot slowed down the computer via hogging resources and sharing interrupts! I think everyone missed one of the points of my original link, that pci support can be removed from chipsets because this company is making a chip that will use one PCI-e lane to support the PCI slot. Good discussion, everyone.
Click to expand...

Yeah, def a niche market, but when a company is using specialized ISA cards that would cost 10-15k to replace, it is a lot cheaper to buy an expensive motherboard.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top