>The way I read it it's mostly a software solution so far, running on top
>of PCI. If they keep it that way, even with new hardware Linux should be
>able to keep supporting PC's. The only impact would be that we won't be
>able to use their drivers, but hey, havn't Linux drivers always been
>_MUCH_ better than M$ drivers anyway?
>I don't think it will be much of a problem. If they close the standard,
>like IBM did with MCA, the standard will just die. I don't think all the
>clone providers will want to pay for using a standard. PCI only became big
>when they opened the standard.
That's a good point. When MCA was released everyone in the industry
agreed that the ISA bus was inadequate. EISA wasn't much better and it had
no more compatibility than MCA (systems were produced with both ISA and MCA
buses). The result was that neither EISA nor MCA succeeded and many of the
motherboard companies produced their own proprietary busses instead.
PCI now runs at half the speed of the motherboard bus (and PCI 2.1 can
run at 66MHz which is the same speed as the motherboard bus). The PCI
design supports multiple buses, RS/6000 systems have been built with 2
buses for double the bandwidth. There never were machines with more than 1
ISA bus, and when EISA/MCA were introduced ISA was considerably less than
half the required speed.
I think that we can just ignore I2O and let it go the way of MCA.
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