Talk:Industry Standard Architecture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think the information here is out of date, so far as I know no PCs' are being made with the ISA bus, typically they have several PCI slots and usually an AGP slot.

Nezumi Replies: by the way. ISA Bus speed is 8MHz for a 16 bit ISA and 4.77 for a 8 bit ISA

There's still significant demand for ISA on industrial motherboards, apparently; legacy devices, plus the fact that many of them don't need all that much bandwidth but *do* need a lot of different devices plugged into them. This last rules out PCI, and USB has close to zero real-time capacity. I have in my lap a catalogue for iei electronics with P4 motherboards with two ISA slots; www.ieiworld.com, if you don't believe me. I'll leave it to the cleverer to edit the actual text.

Apart from internal use on current PC-compatible systems - I'm not so sure about this: most current motherboards use an LPC bus instead, to save having to route all the traces ISA requires.

[edit] What does that picture in the technical section mean????

please tell me or die

... The top picture is a photo of the plastic ISA-type connecting slots that ISA circuit boards plug into. The picture is taken at a strange angle, so look at the PCI article to see what these slots look like when viewed directly at them. The drawings below the picture are just top views of the connectors with notes indicating what each physical connection is used for. It is like unplugging your computer from the wall, pointing the prongs of the plug at your face and putting little labels on them to explain what each of them does. So now I don't die, huh? R.Giltner 20:14, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How many PCI cards can be plugged to Pentium 4 machine without losing performance?

I have got a situation in my project to use 5 PCI video frame grabber cards and to process all card datas simultaneously.

1) Wrong page. Don't ask about Eskimos on a page about escargot, and don't ask about PCI on a page about ISA.

2) This isn't a message board where this type of thing is appropriate to ask. You're really only supposed to discuss the article and info that is currently or may subsequently be included therein.

3) Unless there are resource conflicts, you can plug as many PCI cards into your PC as it can hold without losing performance. Using them all simultaneously is another matter, and could saturate the bus, causing lag. 12.75.48.97 06:38, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 8 bit ISA?

As far as i recall, the name ISA did not surface untill the 16 bit extension of the IBM-PC slot. So, it's a bit like referring to a Model B as a Model T--which i'm sure also happens. [Then there's the whole Model A vs `Model A' nonsense, but i digress.]
—StationaryTraveller 03:56, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Since the shorter 8-bit slots continued to be used in systems even after the longer 16-bit slots were introduced, and either slot could accomodate the vast bulk of cards, I don't see why it wouldn't make sense to call both of them by the same name, and differentiate by the number of bits they used. If I opened up my 386 and found two long slots and a short slot, yet I could plug my original Sound Blaster into any of them, would it really make sense to just call the long ones ISA? 12.75.48.97 06:29, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

The article may be a little incorrect. IBM called them the "PC XT" or "PC AT" bus well into the mid-1990s. "ISA Bus" was a term invented by IBM's competitors at some point. 64.171.162.77 01:35, 10 December 2006 (UTC)