Idea - PCI bus per card slot

[VirtualLarry]

It's probably not very economical in terms of pinouts from the chipset, but has there ever been a chipset or motherboard that supported multiple PCI buses, one for each slot? That way each slot would get dedicated PCI bus bandwidth, and there would be no contention. Sort of like how PCI-E is today. Just wondering. I would probably buy one if it existed.

 

[Concillian]

I'm pretty sure there were some server boards that had multiple PCI busses. One PCI bus for the 32-bit / 33MHz and then a seperate bus for each "server" style slot (32 / 66 or 64 / 66 or 64 /33 or 64 / 133)

 

[Arcanedeath]

Originally posted by: Concillian
I'm pretty sure there were some server boards that had multiple PCI busses. One PCI bus for the 32-bit / 33MHz and then a seperate bus for each "server" style slot (32 / 66 or 64 / 66 or 64 /33 or 64 / 133)

Concillian is correct many Tyan, Intel, & Supermicro server boards support multiple PCI flavors and 3 or more PCI buses, I don't recall any that have have 1 bus per slot but some were close.

 

[Peter]

This approach is expensive, since it requires a ton of silicon (one PCI bridge per slot, and a core chipset that lets you connect these to begin with), and complicates the layout pretty massively.

Consequently, it was only used on server/workstation boards. These often had multiple PCI and PCI-X segments for maximum bandwidth.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I wonder if it would be feasible to build one of these monsters today, by using a core logic chipset that supported PCI-E, and then using a PCI-E to PCI bridge chip for each slot. Call it a "super PCI board". As a plus, you could probably run the PCI busses at 66Mhz. I have some cards that are 66Mhz capable.

 

[mpilchfamily]

basically the PCI-e interface gives you such a performcane boost at to be just about as good as having each PCI slot with its own controler. It won't be too much longer and we'll start seeing motherboards that have no PCI slots.