@Kronos

Quote:

Tell me you never tried without telling me yo never tried…… Look this stuff exist, but outside of some niche cases nobody uses it or even cares. Sometimes the unwashed masses just get it right.

People plug in and use PCIe every day. I just don't see your point. Even memory, although it's less common, Optane and heaps of other things.
GPUs are just massive parallel floating point processors, zero reason why PCIe couldn't be used for general purpose CPU slot cards either. You could even do a plugin for a Pi CM4 if you wanted.
It's a lotless painful than refreshing all the logic for i/o on a motherboard.

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@SHADES

You're wasting your breath. Some people just lack imagination. They can't conceive that a mother-daughter-board architecture, based around the PCIe spec, can be engineered from the ground up to function in accordance with planned requirements, and only view things as simple augments of present day implementations.

They view things in simple "if this then that" relationships. "If I do this on my current motherboard and that happens, surely that will be the case for this new board architecture".

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@agami

Again, no need to imagine anything as these do exist. Noone is buying them as the benefits you claim wouldn‘t come to fruition for 99% of users while the downsides like overall higher cost for a complete system and adding another potential point of failure would effect everyone.

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@Thread

So when's the release date? Have the non-shareholder seed funders, erm I mean Early Adopters been contacted yet?!

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@agami & @SHADES

There are really some PCIe CPU/Computer modules available, you can buy them here:
https://www.bmc.de/slot-cpu-card

There is only one cards listed with a price and it's around 539,03 € , that's without CPU or RAM and they need local RAM for fast memory transfer.

To me it seems, those cards are the most expensive form factor for a CPU board.

You can get a motherboard with CPU and RAM for the same price, I wouldn't recommend buying a PCIe CPU card until you need it for a special purpose.

A motherboard in the PC industry becomes old after 3 years, it is still as fast as before but most people would replace it instead of updating RAM or CPU. Technology is still moving fast, the RAM technology of today will be outdated tomorrow.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 08-Sep-2023 at 06:19 PM.

@OneTimer1

At least these pointless PCIe boards are available rather than "When it's done!"

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@BigD

Looks like it’s getting really close to finally coming out, the latest issue of Amiga Future has A1222 special, https://www.amigafuture.de/app.php/kb/viewarticle?a=10506

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@amigang

OK, I await the Early Adopters getting theirs, hopefully they'll be a leaking of the case and bundled software details and a release date for the rest of us!

Last edited by BigD on 09-Sep-2023 at 01:10 PM.

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@OneTimer1

Quote:

OneTimer1 wrote: @agami & @SHADES There are really some PCIe CPU/Computer modules available, you can buy them here: https://www.bmc.de/slot-cpu-card...

That is a specialist board for a very specialised system with small volumes, hence the higher price.
Were it a system designed for mass adoption in the general open computing market, it would cost less.

Again here we have a lack of imagination. Using existing niche/fringe systems as an example of why a holistic approach would not work.

Quote:

A motherboard in the PC industry becomes old after 3 years, it is still as fast as before but most people would replace it instead of updating RAM or CPU. Technology is still moving fast, the RAM technology of today will be outdated tomorrow.

Exactly why a move toward a well architected mother-daughter-board system would be more suitable in reducing costs of rolling hardware upgrades and reducing e-waste in such a dynamic industry.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @agami Again, no need to imagine anything as these do exist. Noone is buying them as the benefits you claim wouldn‘t come to fruition for 99% of users while the downsides like overall higher cost for a complete system and adding another potential point of failure would effect everyone.

These things, as you refer to them, do not exist. Not as a legitimate alternative to the current way open computing hardware platforms, form factors, and OEMs approach them, for the mainstream market. That is why no one can purchase them.

And yes, were there to be a proper attempt at a mainstream mother-daughter-board architecture, buying an entire system as we might do today would cost about 25-33% more.
But upgrading would cost less, so people would not need to hedge their purchases in heading off near-term upgrades, as they do today, and would still spend about the same amount.

The overall costs of owning and maintaining a system over 3+ years would be the same, just spread out differently, and there would be a reduction in e-waste.

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@agami

Since most people just buy a new complete system instead of upgrading you've just admitted that it would be worse for them, hence they would continue buying full system based on "full" motherboards making everything else the expensive niche it already is.....

But even if you somehow got everybody adopt that brainfart and even if the manage to future proof the backplane for upcoming PCIe gens without going way over in price you'd still have to design a compute board connector that is both "1 size fits all" and yet not an overdesigned disaster waiting to happen.

PCIe slots stop at 16 lanes so thats not an option, instead you now have a compute board with xx lanes but no clue on how they will be used and you have a backplane with slots that could hold yy lanes but without any idea how many of those will be activated.

PCIe ain't a mostly dumb parallel like ISA or Zorro it ain't even something like PCI were you only needed a few extra pins for each slots (and even those were optional when you didn't mind sharing the bandwidth), it is a protocol were each lane is a connection between 1 host and 1 target.

-> these things only exist as specialized HW designed to go with a specific backplane from the same vendor.

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@agami

Quote:

That is a specialist board for a very specialised system with small volumes, hence the higher price.

So not rip off merchants trying rinse every last penny out of their customers. Interesting.

Kronos Quote:

PCIe ain't a mostly dumb parallel like ISA or Zorro it ain't even something like PCI were you only needed a few extra pins for each slots (and even those were optional when you didn't mind sharing the bandwidth), it is a protocol were each lane is a connection between 1 host and 1 target.

You have a good point here. PCI and Zorro II/III are parallel buses all connected together where devices have to ask for control of the bus to use it. PCIe uses point to point high speed serial lanes which all connect back to the CPU allowing the CPU to talk to devices independently and simultaneously without bus overhead. The way PCIe is normally wired, a device on one PCIe slot could not communicate directly to another which was possible with PCI. It may be possible to connect the lanes between two PCIe x16 slots and have a CPU on one of them while allowing for other PCIe cards in the other slot. Adding more PCIe cards would require more PCIe connectors inline with the CPU PCIe x16 slot and specially made CPU card that connect to regular PCIe slots. This would put a limit on the number of PCIe slots available before the CPU card becomes too long but usually few PCIe slots are used. The most common use of a PCIe slot is for a gfx card so it makes more sense to integrate it with the CPU. Some hardware designs are done for marketing reasons. Maybe graphics card businesses think they can make more money by selling a SoC with a GPU and then selling an upgraded gfx card later. There is a performance advantage and I expect enough demand to put a very high end CPU and GPU in the same SoC yet most of the highest end GPUs remain on separate gfx cards. Apple is the only business I'm aware of that is pushing the high performance CPU+GPU SoC integration advantage.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: Adding more PCIe cards would require more PCIe connectors inline with the CPU PCIe x16 slot and specially made CPU card that connect to regular PCIe slots. This would put a limit on the number of PCIe slots available before the CPU card becomes too long but usually few PCIe slots are used.

Obviously most of the pins in x16 connector are NOT the data pins, so a x64 PCIe wouldn't need to be that much longer.

But most consumer CPUs don't have 64 PCIe lanes while server and workstation CPU can have far more.

You may have someone who just needs 1 x16 slot and 1 NVME, you know people that today buy an miniITX board or you may have someone who just needs a small CPU but needs to spread out the few lanes over many devices (and doesn't care if the x16 slot with the GPU ends up running with only 4 lanes.

All not a problem as buying a mobo already defines wether you run Intel or AMD, it confines you to 1-3 generations of either consumer or workstation CPU so the motherboard vendor know very well how many lanes are available from the CPU and how many are multiplied by the chipset and make design decisions based on that.

Consumer has the choice of CPU platform and with each he has the choice of various chipset ranging from the bare minimum to all the bells and whistles.

Something that just isn't feasible/viable when trying to create a busboard standard that should only cater to the whole range but is also supposed to survive the lifespan of a motherboard,

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@Rob

Quote:

Rob wrote: @agami Quote: That is a specialist board for a very specialised system with small volumes, hence the higher price. So not rip off merchants trying rinse every last penny out of their customers. Interesting.

Only when they over-inflate their retail prices exploiting nostalgia, do they become rip-off merchants.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @agami Since most people just buy a new complete system instead of upgrading you've just admitted that it would be worse for them, hence they would continue buying full system based on "full" motherboards making everything else the expensive niche it already is.....

Thanks for not reading the full sentence and only responding to the part that serves your argument.


Quote:

... you'd still have to design a compute board connector that is both "1 size fits all" and yet not an overdesigned disaster waiting to happen. PCIe slots stop at 16 lanes so thats not an option, instead you now have a compute board with xx lanes but no clue on how they will be used and you have a backplane with slots that could hold yy lanes but without any idea how many of those will be activated. Something that just isn't feasible/viable when trying to create a busboard standard that should only cater to the whole range but is also supposed to survive the lifespan of a motherboard.

This is why those who don't lack imagination, design and engineer these things.

Quote:

PCIe ain't a mostly dumb parallel like ISA or Zorro it ain't even something like PCI were you only needed a few extra pins for each slots (and even those were optional when you didn't mind sharing the bandwidth), it is a protocol were each lane is a connection between 1 host and 1 target.

Thanks for teaching me what PCIe is and isn't. This is exactly why I come to this forum every day: to learn.

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@agami

Quote:

Thanks for teaching me what PCIe is and isn't. This is exactly why I come to this forum every day: to learn.

Unable to determine intended sarcasm/irony level. Please advise.

PCIe lanes are high speed serial links. This is the fundamental differentiation from older parallel buses. It's hard to make fast parallel buses where some wide word size has its individual bits pumped down separate traces, keeping everything in sync. Serial transmission is much simpler, so that's what we use now. You can have more than one simultaneous serial link, they just aren't carrying individual "bits" of the same transfer packet

Last edited by Karlos on 13-Sep-2023 at 10:03 AM.
Last edited by Karlos on 13-Sep-2023 at 09:58 AM.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: @agami Quote: Thanks for teaching me what PCIe is and isn't. This is exactly why I come to this forum every day: to learn. Unable to determine intended sarcasm/irony level. Please advise.

Sarcasm level: high. Sarcasm quality: dry.

I have researched this thoroughly a little while back. In conjunction with scouring IEEE papers regarding high bandwidth connectors with high signal integrity.

Last edited by agami on 15-Sep-2023 at 07:23 AM.

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Isn't it going to be a bit awkward at AmiWest this year when these things fail to materialize?

@AmiRich

Or perhaps we'll get an announcement about availability (hopefully)

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