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Unknown slot on new Hammer boards

bigboxes

bigboxes

Lifer
I was checking out the new boards and chipsets in the Computex articles and I keep seeing this expansion slot that looks like a PCI slot except that it is turned around 180 degrees and is slightly out of line with the others. Check out this link of a VIA board. The slot is the one all the way on the left side of the image. What is it?
 
Well, thanks for the info. 🙂

Is this something we really need and will it disappear as new boards are introduced?
 
I believe it could provide advantages for OEM's.

Basically, the premise of this connector is that many periphrial devices for networking / telephony / wireless are based on a "Phy" and a "Mac". For 10/100 (802.3), WLAN (802.11), Bluetooth, v.90, etc... there is an analog phy with a digital baseband / mac.

The thought is that they can integrate the "Mac" functionality into the motherboard chipset and use these riser cards to interface with the "Phy".

For example, with a v.90 modem the logic can be done by the chipset while the filtering is done on the riser card. This is what they do with the AMR cards.

Unfortunatly, these never caught on cause you can get a PCI modem for like $8 bucks.

With newer technologies like 802.11g,a, etc... there could be real cost advantages to seperating the phy and mac this way. The funny part is that by the time this hits economy of scale, integrated single-chip 802.11 solutions will be available which cost the same... again offering OEM's no pricing incentive.

 
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