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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:27:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   Bad idea: a modernized s-100 computer built around pci-e slots

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:35:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • bhtooefr

     @bhtooefr of course! It

   • bhtooefr (bhtooefr@snack.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:36:18 JST bhtooefr

     in reply to
     @foone are you aware of our lord and savior, PICMG?
   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:38:16 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Ok that was a shitpost but really: pci-e has long been in the jank era IMO and we need to fix it

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:41:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     See every interface has an infancy period where compatibility isn't there yet and bugs are still being worked out, then eventually a mature period where it just works well, then a decline when it's been around too long and hasn't yet been replaced, and it's getting janky as we have to come up with strange workarounds for its limitations

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:47:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And PCIe has been in the jank era for a long while and it's for one reason:
     That fucking supplemental power cable that every GPU requires

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:50:55 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Like COME ON

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:54:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     It's made worse by the fact that for like 90% of desktop computers, the GPU is the only thing USING the PCIe slots!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 02:58:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So it's become a slot for one thing, GPUs.

     Short list of things it can't do: GPUs

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:04:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Just design "Super PCIe" which is exactly the same but you added another set of traces designed to carry power to GPUs, and you'd fix it.
     Be clever with it and you won't even lose compatibility, by just having some way to have an adapter that goes to the PSU

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:06:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Like, AGP may have been the worst named standard in the entire history of the PC, but at least it had the idea right in making a specialized PCI-but-for-graphics slot.

     You could do the same for PCIe! Make AGPe, which is just PCIe but you stuck some more power rails, and it is backwards compatible with PCIe cards.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:09:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     AGPe is obviously "Additional Graphics Power - Extreme"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:12:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I dunno. It's a minor thing but it bugs me. It feels like that era of socket 7 boards where we didn't have fan headers yet so CPU fans were powered by inline molex adapters.

     Or those laptop scanners/Webcams/etc that had a keyboard passthru because they were parallel-port based but needed more power, and USB wasn't there yet

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:18:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Whenever this sort of nonsense happened in the PC industry, it was a clear sign that something janky was happening, and someone had to get clever to make this work, but don't worry, in a couple years we'll figure out the "right" way to do this.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:19:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     But we've have GPUs in with supplemental power for what, a decade?! Longer?

   • vxo (vxo@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:23:45 JST vxo

     in reply to

     @foone I swear I once remember having some motherboard that supported a special variant of AGP for which I never saw a single GPU that matched it - the connector was extra long and had a bunch of power-only pins beyond the normal AGP slot. It was sufficiently weird.

     Watch as every manufacturer decides to put the AGPe pins in a different position

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:25:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     It's like that period when you could get memory card readers that fit in your floppy drive because USB wasn't there or reliable enough to read SmartMedia cards

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:30:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     It just feels like we're in that "we gotta hack around the limitations of our current tech..." era that can't last long, but for some reason it never ends.

     If 90% of what PCIe slots are used for is something that finds PCIe insufficient... Then fix PCIe already!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:35:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Christopher :coffefied:

     @Christopher well, there've been back planes for ISA, PCI, PCIe...

   • Christopher :coffefied: (christopher@mastodon.coffee)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:35:10 JST Christopher :coffefied:

     in reply to

     @foone

     I swear I've seen something like this, but it was PCI not PCI-e.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:37:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Every time I hook up a GPU it feels like I'm installing one of those early tape backup cards that connects to the floppy controller through some weird three way cable

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:40:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Or my first 3D accelerator where I had to use a VGA loopback cable because it only worked in 3D mode and it had to be able to passthru the discrete 2D card

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:44:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     There's just a distinct feeling I get when PC stuff is pushing the limits of current tech and it has to do janky things for performance or cost reasons, but we put up with it because it's clearly a transitional period that can't last forever.

     But PCIe GPUs have been stuck in the valley of jank for a decade now. You have to leave the nest sometime, PCIe.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:46:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Anyway, this gives me a really bad idea:

     GPU but it interfaces with the motherboard though one of those fake floppy disk adapters.

     Where does it get power, you may ask?

     Obviously it steals power from the PS/2 port!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:56:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch)

     @hakirsch the latter

   • HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch) (hakirsch@furries.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:56:20 JST HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch)

     in reply to

     @foone do you mean card readers that connected via the FD interface or that fit into the drive like a disk similar to how a car stereo cassette line-in adapter works

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:28:49 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • niche witch with a 🐝

     @clairely_undaunted that'd be an acceptable solution to me! So long as the motherboard gets powered by the GPU through the slot and not through some janky wires

   • niche witch with a 🐝 (clairely_undaunted@mastodon.triggerphra.se)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:28:50 JST niche witch with a 🐝

     in reply to

     @foone the supplemental power requirements and which connector you need has changed over time. which would have been a PCI-e spec change each time? Not that they haven’t had that many changes too though. frankly at this point you can easily have a gfx card that uses more power than the motherboard, might as well move the power connectors to the graphics card and power the motherboard from the port

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:33:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Alternatively bad idea:
     A double-height GPU, so it can have its own IEC connector. Just plug in a second AC power cable into the GPU

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:35:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Eventually the GPU will be fully external and talk to the main PC over 10g ethernet or wifi

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:36:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The world's first Bluetooth LE GPU!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:42:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     But battery life would be an issue...
     Maybe it can get power from the PC somehow... Oh I know: the ps/2 port!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:48:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Eventually you're going to open up your pc and there won't be a motherboard, your GPU will just have a CPU socket and some ram slots.

     And that'll still make more sense than the current design!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 04:50:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The first EATX sized GPU

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 05:09:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch)

     @hakirsch yup! Flashpath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

   • HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch) (hakirsch@furries.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 05:09:38 JST HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch)

     in reply to

     @foone are you for real???? I had no idea such things existed!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 06:08:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Alexander The 1st

     @AT1ST it's a joke on how those old systems couldn't rely on USB existing yet, so they used PS/2 power instead

   • Alexander The 1st (at1st@mstdn.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 06:08:14 JST Alexander The 1st

     in reply to

     @foone Why not get power from the USB port?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 22:55:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • F4GRX Sébastien

     @f4grx I don't believe so. It's only got minor differences with PCI, the primary difference is that it doesn't have to share bandwidth with the rest of the PCI bus

   • F4GRX Sébastien (f4grx@chaos.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 22:55:55 JST F4GRX Sébastien

     in reply to

     @foone Did anyone make non-graphic card peripheral for the AGP bus?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 23:17:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Miah Johnson
     • F4GRX Sébastien

     @miah @f4grx weird!

   • Miah Johnson (miah@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 23:17:45 JST Miah Johnson

     in reply to

     • F4GRX Sébastien

     @foone @f4grx looks like there was a one-off apg-usb card in some PoS systems.

     https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28052

   • vxo (vxo@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 23:55:39 JST vxo

     in reply to

     @foone oh my glob i thought all memories of those things were safely gone

     freaking qic