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Mini PCI vs. Mini PCIe . . .
Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2012-03-20 05:16:42 Yeah, I figured most everything out, equating CardBus with PCIe in terms of the the MacBook slot was all I needed. I'm used to PCMCIA and CardBus being used interchangeably with PC Card by now, that was going on ten-fifteen years ago, IIRC. The vast majority of Laptop users today have never seen, nor heard of, a Laptop Beast that has a 16 bit "PC Card" slot that won't let itself be damaged by the insertion of a card with the gold stripe. Now, I'm on the prowl for a Mini PCIe internal card <-> PCIe external card adapter . . . Question: once my PCie <-> PCI Slot adapter gets here, will I find that PCIe is backwards compatible with PCI to a limited extent. I'm ASSumIng that a full size PCIe Slot would be a super-set of PCI Slot function, signals and speed? I still don't know (idle curiosity) if the Pismo's CardBus slot it is *X.3 Compatible.* p.s. I have the info on wood pulp based storage media and Google at hand for this kind of info, but I figure it's good to get this stuff into the record. Then I can then link to it in the (theoretical) 68kMLA Thread Link Addendum to the Peripherals Links Project . . . . . . on top of being lazy and only casually curious at this point. [😉] ]'>
Posted by: Gorgonops on 2012-03-20 08:36:07 Question: once my PCie <-> PCI Slot adapter gets here, will I find that PCIe is backwards compatible with PCI to a limited extent. I'm ASSumIng that a full size PCIe Slot would be a super-set of PCI Slot function, signals and speed? I'm not sure what you're angling at here, but... no. From a programming standpoint PCIe can be treated like an evolution of PCI but the physical implementation is completely different. PCI is a conventional parallel bus with multiplexed address/data lines while PCIe is a point-to-point serial topology with transfers encapsulated into packets. Electrically they're not alike at all. Converting from one to the other requires a bridge chip, it's not just shuffling wires around. Note that said bridge chips most of the time don't cause software problems but your mileage may vary depending on the card, particularly if it makes extensive use of DMA/bus-mastering.
Posted by: Bunsen on 2012-03-29 05:09:33 equating CardBus with PCIe in terms of the the MacBook slot was all I needed. Cardbus is not PCIe related. It's based on PCI.
Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2012-03-29 05:28:00 Thanks for the correction, B. Sorry, wrong word, .TXT output error once more. His statement was a simile not a direct connection between the two, but it illustrated the missing bit of my puzzle. :b&w:
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