PCIe Primer - Final thoughts

Most people I talk with think that PCIe is just the next big video card standard.  I couldn’t disagree more.  PCIe, as an architecture, has a lot more to offer us than just video.  I believe that if PCIe replaced the whole PCI bus on our new computers, we would be getting rid of some bottlenecks we’ve been living with for way too long. 

But of course change takes time.  There are literally thousands of PCI cards on the market that would become completely obsolete if the industry began to suddenly support PCIe over PCI.  There’s the problem with existing inventory -- the hardware used to make these cards, even the technology on them would have to change in order to be able to move to PCIe.

But this can happen in stages.  I remember the days when ISA was first phased out to bring in PCI.  Suddenly every machine had two ISA slots, and three or four PCI slots.  Maybe that’s the way that we can begin to reap the benefits of PCIe.  By having motherboards with two distinct buses, we could continue to use some of our legacy components, and yet not be held back from utilizing our new PCIe-enabled hardware.  This already exists in current motherboards, but there is usually only a slot or two for your video card(s), and that’s it.

But truth be told, we will be doing this all again sometime in the not too distant future, when a new technology comes along and makes PCIe obsolete, as well.