PCI is as crippled as the PC world it came from. The _theoretical_ max 
speed of a PCI bus is very high, yes, and this is what makes all the 
paper comparisons look so great for it. realworld performance is pretty 
mediocre though. The same number of conductors with the same clock can do 
_so_ much more, and in other busses, less wires and slower clocks _does_ do
more. TURBOchannel for example. fast as hell. only 44 conductors. simple 
interface logic. why did it die? because the post-olsen DEC decided that
PCI was the 'way of the future' like everyone else did. if everyone 
believes that it is, then yes it becomes so, but it doesnt mean that its 
any good. 


Isildur

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Brad Spencer wrote:

> 
>    Lord Isildur writes:
>    > shit. so the only game in town now is sparc, eh? sun hasnt made a truly 
>    > decent box since they dropped sbus and went to pee-sea-eye.. 
> 
>    Oh, come now.  What's wrong with the PCI bus?  It's vastly faster, and in 
>    many ways saner, than SBus.  And they've latched onto cheap, insanely 
>    functionaly video cards and cheap hard drives for workstations (not for 
>    servers, of course). 
> 
>    Personally, I think Sun is spot on.  There's something to be said for 
>    economies of scale. 
> 
>    Ken Seefried, CISSP 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I don't know if this is still there, but when Sun first came out with the
> PCI based sparcs, there was a "warning", of sorts, on their own web page.
> If I recall properly, it stated that the buss speed would be about the
> same, even though the PCI buss is faster.  Something to do with interrupt
> latency, or some such.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org
> http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
> [finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]
>