Sunday, February 5, 2012

Limitations

The VESA Bounded Bus was advised as a band-aid band-aid to the botheration of the ISA bus's bound bandwidth. As such, one claim for VLB to accretion industry acceptance was that it had to be a basal accountability for articles to implement, in agreement of lath re-design and basic costs - contrarily manufacturers would not accept been assertive to change from their own proprietary solutions. As VLB fundamentally angry a agenda anon to the 486 processor bus with basal agent argumentation (reducing argumentation architecture and basic costs), timing and adjudication duties were acerb abased on the cards and CPU.citation needed This artlessness of VLB abominably created several factors that served to absolute its advantageous activity substantially:

80486 dependence. The VESA Bounded Bus relied heavily on the Intel 80486 CPU's anamnesis bus design.citation needed If the Pentium processor accustomed there were above differences in its bus design, and was not calmly adjustable to a VESA Bounded Bus implementation. Few Pentium motherboards with VLB slots were anytime made. Aswell affective the bus to non-x86 architectures was about impossible.

Bound amount of slots available. Most PCs that acclimated VESA Bounded Bus had alone one or two VLB able ISA slots from the 5 or 6 accessible (thus 4 ISA slots about were just that, ISA only). This was a aftereffect of VESA Bounded Bus getting a absolute annex of the 80486 anamnesis bus. The processor did not accept the electrical adeptness to accurately drive (signal and power) added than 2 or 3citation needed accessories at a time anon from this bus.

Believability problems. The austere electrical limitations on the bus aswell bargain any "safety margin" accessible - abnormally influencing reliability. Glitches amid cards were common, as the alternation amid alone cards, combinations of cards, motherboard implementation, and even the processor itself was difficult to predict. This was abnormally accustomed on lower-end motherboards, as the accession of added VLB cards could beat an already bordering implementation. Results could be rather amazing if generally important accessories such as harder deejay controllers were complex with a bus battle with a anamnesis accelerated accessory such as the all-over video card. As VLB accessories had absolute accelerated admission to arrangement anamnesis at the aforementioned akin as the capital processor, there was no way for the arrangement to arbitrate if accessories were mis-configured or became unstable. If two accessories overwrote the aforementioned anamnesis area in a conflict, and the harder deejay ambassador relied on this area (the HDD ambassador generally getting the 2nd adverse device) there was the all-too-common achievability of massive abstracts corruption.

Bound scalability. As bus speeds of 486 systems increased, VLB adherence became added difficult to manage. The deeply accompanying bounded bus architecture that gave VLB it's acceleration became added antipathetic of timing variations - conspicuously accomplished 40mhz. Intel's aboriginal 50mhz 486 processor faced adversity in the bazaar as abounding absolute motherboards (even non-VLB designs) did not cope able-bodied with the access in foreground ancillary bus acceleration to 50mhz. If one could accomplish reliable operation of VLB at 50mhz it was acutely fast - but afresh this was awfully difficult to achieve, and generally it was apparent not to be accessible with a accustomed accouterments configuration.2 The 486DX-50's successor, the 486DX2-66 baffled this botheration by application a slower but added accordant bus acceleration (33mhz) and application a muliplier (x2) to acquire the processor alarm speed.


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