Mini PCI vs. Mini PCIe . . .

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

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. [] ]'>

 

[Gorgonops]

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.

 

[Bunsen]

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.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

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: