Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!charon!piring.cwi.nl!jack From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: The Future of Buses (and Futurebus) Message-ID: Date: 11 Dec 90 23:58:11 GMT References: <36734@cup.portal.com> <1990Dec10.185346.4114@zoo.toronto.edu> Sender: news@cwi.nl Lines: 27 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >... My belief is that buses >have hit about the point that processor architectures were at a decade or >so ago: drowning in their own useless complexity. FUTUREbus is the >Intel 432 of buses. I eagerly await the RISC revolution. I have the strong feeling that Futurebus will never take off, except maybe for some niche market. VME took about 5 years to take off (i.e. before more than 10 firms started making boards for it). Multibus II (about an order of magnitude more complex) never took off, and will now probably die slowly with Intel so involved in Futurebus. MB-II was already too complex for most applications except for some very specialised things. Futurebus is worse, and quite a bit later as well. I think that FDDI and VME will have divided the low and middle end of Futurebus' market by the time it comes available. That would leave only the very high performance multi-processor market (flightsimulator and such). Not really a market that will have hundreds of vendors build boards for it.... -- -- Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht | Oral: Jack Jansen zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen | Internet: jack@cwi.nl dan dooft het licht | Uucp: hp4nl!cwi.nl!jack