Measuring bandwidth across PCI Bus

[rugger]

Originally posted by Kurt
Yes, but software raid was a small part of the MB market, as was AC'97.

Now AC'97 is virtually on all MB's. Soft RAID is next.

(Pedantic)

AC'97 is not what you are talking about. AC'97 is simply a specification that defines a bus that is used to connect a codec chip (the codec chip contains the analog mixer and the ADC/DAC units) and the sound processor together. AC'97 is implemented on most fully accellerated soundcards, including creative's sb-live and audiligy.

What you are talking about is software based sound controllers.

(/Pedantic)

Isn't software raid already appearing on intel's high end chipsets. Besides, for RAID, where it is implemented doesn't make a difference unless you are using raid 5. All other modes have minimal processing overheads.

[VJ]

I recall a hardware pci monitor: you plug it into a pci-slot,
and can read the speed and usage on an lcd display mounted in a drive bay.
edit: http://www.vicstech.com/en/rd2/index.shtml

Some mainboard manufactures draw the buslayout (e.g. Supermicro X5DA8), to show on what bus integrated hardware is connected (this mainboard has 1 PCI and 2 PCI-X busses).

Jorg

[Kurt]

Originally posted by rugger
(Pedantic)

AC'97 is not what you are talking about. AC'97 is simply a specification that defines a bus that is used to connect a codec chip (the codec chip contains the analog mixer and the ADC/DAC units) and the sound processor together. AC'97 is implemented on most fully accellerated soundcards, including creative's sb-live and audiligy.

What you are talking about is software based sound controllers.

(/Pedantic)

Isn't software raid already appearing on intel's high end chipsets. Besides, for RAID, where it is implemented doesn't make a difference unless you are using raid 5. All other modes have minimal processing overheads.

AC'97 is indeed only a spec, but a spec all chipset audio components adhere to. And it saves some typing to just call it AC'97

You'll notice that onboard sound is hardly hardware accelerated, and that back when AC'97 was designed the performance hit was much higher than what it is now.

SoftRAID is sth new in the chipset. It does use up some resource from the CPU, albeit not that much. And that's the whole point. Intel (and others) can implement RAID almost for free on their chipsets and have the CPU do the at a minimal cost -a few % points.

When you put it all together it still adds up: USB+AC97+SoftRAID+whatever. SoftRAID might not be the ultimate resource hog, but Intel keeps on finding new ways to use up CPU resources that a perfectly good (separate) chip could do. That's like what Microsoft is doing with Windows: keep adding components that the competition has been selling, for free(or almost).

You can always find better alternatives, but you'll have to pay additional kudos for it. Like you perfectly and fully accelerated soundcard.