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by formerly_proven 761 days ago
Intel Architecture Labs is responsible for essentially the entire I/O architecture of virtually all computers (not just x86) for the last ~three decades: USB, SATA, PCI and PCIe, plus PCI-for-Graphics (AGP). Notably all of these were largely developed in-house at Intel and then basically gifted more or less finished to standards bodies or Intel created an industry consortium around them.
2 comments
mschuster91 760 days ago
Wonder what made Intel keep its damn paws firmly on Thunderbolt up until the USB4 days. To this day it's still a truckload of issues/hacks to get old PCs upgraded with Thunderbolt 2/3 cards.
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Eisenstein 760 days ago
How much of that is because the tech was better versus because it was Intel pushing for it? There were competing standards such as (off the top of my head) SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?), Firewire and PCIx.
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justsomehnguy 760 days ago
> SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?),

Nope, there is a lot of differences (Wiki would help on the details), most notably is what SATA was designed to be cheap from the start, including the controller complexity; while SCSI demands a quite intelligent controller, which costs more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison_to_other_inter...

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to11mtm 760 days ago
> SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?), Ehh, ever since ATAPI, both old 'IDE' style as well as SATA hosts could use SCSI commands. The speed you get with a SATA cable, wire for wire, is a win over any SCSI cable I've ever seen, let alone the LVD vs HVD and everything else you had to worry about.

>Firewire

arguably had the right ideas at the wrong time; the extra power delivery is something we are finally now seeing in USB. However firewire was still relatively expensive.

> PCIx

PCI-X was still parallel with lots of data lines/etc which can cause it's own problems. Aside from having multiple cards potentially hamming each other up (PCI-Express this is less possible since it's point to point rather than shared lines) there is the challenge of the large number of traces and the difficulty in running them on a board as the signalling frequency scales up.

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