Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 22:32:10 -0500 From: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Watchdog timers (was: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards) Message-ID: <199602040332.WAA26253@etinc.com>
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Terry L. daydreams..... >2) The customer differences between PCI and ISA is: > > ISA PCI > PlugNPlay no(a) YES > Fast no YES > 16 bit limit yes NO > Passive probe no YES > Runs out of IRQs yes NO(b) > Lots of broken cards yes NO(c) > > (a) There are con artists who will try to sell you PNP ISA... > report these people to the BBB. It's not PNP if it only > works with some cards and not the on-board hardware. > (b) PCI allows IRQ sharing. > (c) What idiot wants broken cards? > > The average user could care less if they had PCI or ISA in > their system until it came time to upgrade from Windows 3.11 > to Windows95 or Windows95 to WindowsNT (at which point they > then care a lot). > >It's idiotic to pay for things you'll never use. The "average" user >never opens his box to install anything he didn't buy with the machine >in the package offered by the dealer anyway, so he doesn't give a >*damn* what bus he has, as long as it works. except that with your box the customer will be paying for lots of things they don't want or need. They'll have fewer choices without ISA or IDE and therefore everything will cost more. contrast J. Greco's argument last week for building "cheap" routers with $20 isa cards and small IDEs....cost is king. I have 35 machines in my lab and your MB is a replacement for exactly zero of them. >> Some food for thought...... >> >> You guys have been tossing around ideas about a "watchdog timer" board >> for the past week or so.......just remember that you wouldn't be having >> the conversation at all if you had to build a PCI card to implement it. > >Why; are PCI edge card connectors more expensive? > >What about the riser socket? That doesn't care what kind of bus you have >in the machine, since it goes in the CPU socket. > >Or is it that PCI has the reset circuitly designe *correctly* (unlike >ISA, PCI is speced -- it's not a PCI box if the reset circuitry isn't >correct). > >Or is it that a countdown reset timer is an optionally speced item >for a PCI controller chip? (see PCI 2.1 specification). 8-). I think that the PCI bus interface logic is a little more complex than ISA, but since you're clearly not objective on this issue I'll just let it go. Dennis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 for BSD/OS, FreeBSD and LINUX
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