Reply 100 of 107, by canthearu
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-05-30, 10:35:canthearu wrote on 2020-05-29, 13:10:VLB is a cool historical item, but at the time, PCI was a badly needed replacement. The Pentium and newer chips would have not been directly compatible with VLB, and the large card size and limited slot numbers significantly limited its future potential.
PCI was not a replacement for VLB. They came out at pretty much the same time and were actually competing standards. Until later in 1994 it was not obvious that PCI was going to be the winner. It was only when PCI 2.0 came around that things began to change, so if you want to be fair you should compare VLB 1.0 to PCI 1.0. There was a VLB 2.0 specification which addressed many issues of 1.0, but I think it wasn't really used in anything since Intel's chipset monopoly caused most other chipset vendors to throw in the towel.
In the short term, VLB was a very easy standard for the market to adopt. Not requiring any real chipset support and being backwards compatible with ISA, meant it could be added to motherboards at low additional development cost. While PCI was released 1992, no desktop parts were ready for it yet, so it makes sense that the market originally went with the easiest short term solution to adding more bandwidth.
However, due to it's lack of auto-configuration, and the physical presentation of the bus, in the longer term, it had no chance in terms of features and price when compared to PCI. PCI, once backed into the system chipset, was just cheaper to implement, and cheaper to build expansion cards for. Auto-configuration and robust signalling meant much fewer technical problems which would represent cheaper support costs. On phyiscal size alone, VLB cards had to be at least 3 times physically larger than PCI cards, exacerbating construction and transport costs for VLB computer equipment.
To say they were competitors to each other would be suggesting that VLB had a chance to become the long running dominant standard.
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-05-30, 10:35:SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-05-27, 21:44:Great to see another PCI 486-100mhz build around here though! I know they get a bit of flack for being a bit "boring", but regardless of what the VLB-Squad (or maybe VLBros?)
Where can I sign up for VLB-Squad?
I have a nice 486DX2-66 VLB system, and a 5x86-133mhz PCI systems.
Both are awesome, but I have put a video card in the PCI system (S3 968 with VRAM) that is ridiculously faster than the the one I have in the VLB system (S3 804 with DRAM). Unfortunately the really good VLB cards are damn rare and expensive. Just with a quick test at 800 x 600, 256 colours, the VLB card is only about 1/3 as quick as the PCI card in Windows