[geeks] Carly's Gone!!!

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Well, PCI wasn't supposed to have been exposed as a mezzanine bus at
> all, but a chip interconnect.  It wasn't good enough for a system bus,
> and got morphed into a mezzanine bus.

Huh? Where did you get that information? Never heard of a "mezzanine bus"
care to explain? PCI was never intended as a chip interconnect, again... I
have no idea that there were standarized "chip interconnects" it is a
periferal bus, local bus at the beginning, then it had to be part of a
bridged chipset due to the fact the front bus in the P5 et al was much
faster than the 33Mhz local bus of the 486 that the PCI was modeled after.

> I thought PCI-X was basically just an improved mezzanine bus, not a
> motherboard I/O subsystem.

I think you misunderstood PCI-X is a fast PCI, PCI-Express is a completely
different switching fabric. Has nothing to do with PCI since PCI-Express
is a switched collection of point to point serial channels. Basically you
connect the PCI-X to a lane in the PCI-Express wich will eventually
connect it to other PCI-X's or the Memory or the Processor.

> I didn't realize it was supposed to be a whole system thing.
>
> Right now it seems like it isn't used for anything except graphics
> cards.

Haven't seen any PCI-X gfx cards at all... so I dunnot what you are
talking about.

> Are any non-x86 vendors using it?

Well Apple offers PCI-X on the G5, same for other vendors.