I'll concede that I may have overstated the problems with PCI cards and a well designed card should work in additional systems as well as X86. (I still maintain that not all cards are well designed) However, there is still an issue with peripheral hardware that is processor specific. Also, a third party vendor must make a conscious decision to support their products on a given platform. This can have significant cost even if it is just a "re-compile" of the drive. Cost which many companies will not pay to sell in to what they consider a small market. I spent months trying to get National Instruments (www.ni.com) to support one of their products on an Alpha/WinNT machine. They have full support for X86/WinNT and it should have been simple to recompile for the Alpha, but they wouldn't do it. We even offered to do the port ourselves. We lost a multi million dollar contract, in part, because NI was so stubborn. Issues like this are a significant reason for the continued dominance of the X86/PC architecture.
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Torrie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 6:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [uug] Industry standards processor On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 17:19, Soren Harward wrote: > Tucker, David wrote: > > They may not be concerned about running > > Windows app (for a time, I had an SGI X86 PC that did run windows) but there > > are plenty of peripheral that run on the X86. Your SCSI card or fancy new > > video card use X86 bios code. Plug one into the PCI bus of a sparc, and you > > wont get far. The PCI card bios can be redone, but that's expensive and you > > will loose the advantages of commodity goods. > > The statement about PCI hardware being tied to he processor isn't > entirely true. There's a ton of hardware I've used in both Alpha and > x86 machines, from SCSI controllers to sound cards. Right now I have a > graphics card in my Alpha that used to be in my K6/166. There might be > some weird platform-dependent cards, but in every case I've seen, as > long as the driver compiles on the architecture, the card will work. I second that. I have an ultrasparc 30 at work, and I plan on putting in a promise ide controller and an ide disk, since scsi are so expensive (and western digital is now selling 10k rpm enterprise-grade ide disks). Most video cards should work. Sound cards, etc. There are endian issues (With DMA and so forth), but that's largely a software issue. The driver sorts that out. Most PCI devices have no real dependency on the BIOS per se, as long as someone initializes them along the way, like the operating system. The PCI spec itself provides for a lot of the configuration. On systems that support hot-swapping the pci bus, there is no bios there at all. It's all up to the OS. Hopefully Linux will support this in 2.6. Only Solaris does currently. Michael -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
