Jack, I love a good rant as much as anybody, but some context is needed.
PCI was desperately needed by server class hardware. The ISA bus and the extensions to the ISA bus were failing for several reasons: - Inability to share interrupt lines - Three fragmented standards (ISA, VL, and EISA) - Inconsistent handling of high memory accessing - Limited DMA channels - Too specific to PC architecture - Configuration and init code was polluting the PC address map. Thank heavens we finally got a real bus. PCI Express (I'm assuming you meant this, not PCI-X) is mostly compatible with PCI at the software level. The reason for PCI-Express was the need to reduce pin count and move to what is basically a serial interface, similiar to the transition the industry made when it went from the PATA to the SATA interface. It's an engineering solution to get better speed, which most people want. The move to 4K sector sizes has very good technical reasons behind it. It's not the end of the world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
