Monday 9 March 2020

The PCIE Lanes famine..or High Performance vs Drastically Reduced Functionality

Hi www

Today an amazing deal for a Ryzen came up. Less than half price!.. wow.. and then I thought.. 'wait don't newer CPU's have like no lanes?? (20 lanes) What does that mean for my many PCIE drives??..no, I don't have enough reason spend a fortune on a new rig, the rig I have (HP workstation) is more than capable and isn't PCIE gimped.'

Going forward we should even MORE lanes not less.. my dual X5650.. give 56 lanes EACH. Admittedly they are PCIE gen 2.. but.. 112 lanes of gen 2 vs 20 of gen3 or even 4.. nope.

This encourages me to do the unthinkable.. to recommend to people old tech.

I don't need the thing to be a server but I need the ability to have as many drives as I would like in the machine.

Let's face it.. if it's not PCIE its not the fastest possible speed. So it follows that all internal components should be PCIE to give us the fast possible performance.

Why do we need other busses in this day and age? What advantage does SATA have over PCIE?.. and even USB.. I DO think we should keep USB devices.. but couldn't the next new standard be a reworking of PCIE? For speed purposes only.. not the 75w requirement!

What can I get from on board busses that I couldn't get from a separate card of the same type?

To do as I suggest..we need 60 to 100+ lanes and 20 physical slots (at least 20 physical slots) each of the first four double spaced away from each other so no overlap. After that as tight as you like. These would be.. as I would dub them.. EXL-ATX boards and be near double the length of a ATX.. They would need fasteners at the side of the board for the lower 16 physical slots.. as the peripherals would be expected to be internal *only*..

I digress..

I don't why this isn't happening already.. but again I am bemused when case manufacturers don't work out a way to do vertical cases and insist on horizontal. The air wants to escape upwards anyway, why push it elsewhere?.. you would need a splash guard yes, but any decent fans would be able to be a splash guard anyway.

I digress .. again.. sorry..

We don't NEED all this new fancy hardware.. we have already reached a comfortable stage, however if the is .. IF THERE is to be new hardware, we should be designing it with the future in mind, not building in absurd obsolescence.

Dava