How long has PCI got left?

Associate
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5 Oct 2003
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I use my machine primarily for music production, relying on a PCI soundcard. I am also currently looking at purchasing a OCI RAID controller. I'm a little concerned about having to replace these investments with the advent of AMD's new Socket (M?)

Can anyone tell me if they've heard anything about PCI slots being phased out on the new boards? Also, when is the new socket scheduled for?

Thanks!
 
Associate
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I thought that sound cards had some kind of problems on PCIe, something about the data distorting badly. Uhm Ill just print a quote here of the thing I read:

Some guy from creative said:
Last week we published our review of the SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatality soundcard from Creative Labs. One of the questions that remained to be answered was why Creative decide to go for a PCI only based soundcard, we found out that in the near future there will not be a PCI-Express version of the sound card. Steve Erickson, vice president for Creative's audio products was kind enough to answer this particular question specifically, here's his take:

As far as PCI Express (PCIe) is concerned, which is the next bus, what we found is that the performance of PCIe is truly bad for audio. We are seeing four times degradation on the bus for audio.

PCIe is designed for graphics and high data transfer, but audio sends very small packets and the overhead can be very big! Moving the data across PCIe is much, much higher than PCI. So what we have to do is go back to the drawing board and work on the transport part of the chip and re-design it to add more silicon to overcome some of the problems we had with PCIe. So for us to come up with a PCIe solution is going to take a while because we have to overcome the problems we're facing with that bus.

Whether or not that means a PCIe sound card is near now or not I do not know. That quote was 30th august of 2005.
 
Associate
OP
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Thanks for your reply - I was more asking about how long motherboards with PCI slots would be available for, because as far as I know the pro soundcard companies (RME,Echo etc) aren't even really looking into PCI-E solutions!
 
Soldato
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I should imageine they will stay around for a while yet.
They are more suited to sound cards due to having lower latencies than PCIe, they have much lower bandwidth though. pros and cons..... Latency is more important for sound.
 
Soldato
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Can't see PCI disappearing for ages yet...even now in 2006 AGP is by far the numerically superior graphics system in pc's, and in most people's setups performs as well if not better than an equivalent (if there is one!)

Tis a fairly low cost, but high performing solution...
 
Associate
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PCI-E hasn't taken off yet fully with very devices available (some network cards, a few DVB cards, a few SATA and RAID cards and one or two SCSI cards). Until the majority of devices are available in a PCI-E format then PCI will remain. The thing is that everyone still has PCI slots and many devices don't need the extra bandwidth (10/100 network, consumer sound cards, wireless cards) so there's no real incentive to jump.

EDIT: The new socket (I assume you're talking about AMD) is due Q2 2006 which means about April / May.
 
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