Will Apple use PCI-X 533
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And will video card manufacturers use it too? I miss not being able to have 2 good video cards in my system.
And will video card manufacturers use it too? I miss not being able to have 2 good video cards in my system.
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The PCI bus has strong brand recognition, and there are many with huge investments in very expensive PCI cards who will upgrade machines only to the point that they can bring those cards over to new machines. HT or RIO will probably be the fabric that connects the new PCI standards to the CPU/system bus, but I really think PCI will stick around.
If I own a system with expensive SCSI controllers and video en/decoders, I probably want to use those cards for a while. Replacing the Computer is one thing, replacing a few SCSI RAID's and KonaHD cards is quite another. Yes studios have money, but many will decide to keep on keeping on. Companies don't bleed money like they used too. Even ILM decided to use Dells recently. That tells you something.
It's a safe step cause you're not really gambling on something new.
If there wouldn't be too many complications if a redesign was needed, AMD has a dual PCI-X bridge, AGP3.0 bridge, and I/O hub for HT. The I/O hub doesn't have Firewire in any form and lacks a few other things I know of but is very well outfitted.
But Motorola is pro-RapidIO as well as IBM (I think) and it would be tough to get HT chips out of them. HT also has higher pin count raising packaging costs.
From what I've read, HT looks like a better technology, and it's faster. I'd like to see a HT board with PCI-X, Firewire 2, USB2, Serial ATA, Infiniband (high-end and servers), DDR, Bluetooth and AirPort 2 (802.11b/g) included, and anything else that is high-tech. The sad thing is, all this technology is available. 802.11g might still be in the works, I'm not exactly sure. It's just a matter of implementing it. I know Apple waits to make let others find all the bugs in protocols but, they're getting a position where if they don't do something drastic, they'll start to lose market share regularly.
And of course a G5 to process all that. Hopefully, a G5 would be out by the time this would actually happen. If not, it's because Apple is dead and Motorola gave out too many pink slips.
<strong>Remember that something has to be out on the PC for a minimum for two years before Apple will adopt it. <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" /> Look at: HyperTransport/RapidIO, DDR Ram, etc. Of course there are exceptions: Firewire, USB and the Superdrive. My point is you ask? If it's a MOTHERBOARD technology, from the time it's announced...tack on two years for it to show up on a Mac. It pisses me off but it's pretty much reality these days.</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's not completely true. Apple was an early adopter of the original PCI spec in 1995, the same year it began appearing in PC's. They were also one of the first adopters of DIMMs over SIMMs. AGP was less than a year behind the PC world. Same with Ultra ATA 33/66/100. Remember, it's the entire PC market being compared to Apple. Apple has to maintain regular product cycles. They can't completely redesign their entire motherboard just because a PC maker started shipping a newer technology. IBM, HP, and the rest have the same problem. Sometimes it's IBM that gets the jump on a technology, sometimes it's one of the others. Sometimes it just seems like Apple is way behind because the computer industry moves so quickly.