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Thanks for the comment, and you're right, modern computers do have a much better architecture! As I was laying out the story I was thinking about what it looked

Thanks for the comment, and you're right, modern computers do have a much better architecture! As I was laying out the story I was thinking about what it looked like when we started. I'll clarify that in the image caption that it's from that era.

hodgesrm 2y ago
Thanks for a very informative article. It would be interesting have more detail about how EBS achieved a strong culture around quality and system resilience. Maybe a future post?
bravetraveler 2y ago
We may be going full circle with consumer systems being so light for lanes under PCI-e gen5! There's usually enough for a GPU, SSD or two... and that's about it. I don't like having to spend so much for fast IO, dangit. Can sometimes find boards that do switching to appease :/
- trueismywork 2y ago
  Put your gpu on chipset 8 lane and use a pcie to nvme hub to get upto 7 nvmes
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    I hadn't even gotten into NICs and such yet, though! There was a time when I didn't have to play this game of Tetris
    - lmz 2y ago
      That time was probably when SLI/crossfire was still around so high-end consumer boards had a reason to include plenty of slots for 3 GPUs.
      - bravetraveler 2y ago
        The industry has made a market segment for this/largely ignored it, 'HEDT'. I'd say this is evidence to your point, GPUs being the motivator. I'm starting to think I'm the only one still using add-in NICs, sound cards, or bifurcation. The ATX spec allows for 7 or fewer physical slots. That's not what's letting me down! How many lanes are actually available and their division changes over time. Everything from USB to SATA has internally been moving to PCI-e, there's more 'internal consumption', too. Gen5 is kind of a victim of success. Each individual lane is very fast, but providing them to a fair number of add-in cards/devices isn't practical. Simply physically, but also bandwidth between lanes. Pretty much all of gen4 is nice, those systems are perfectly viable. More lanes that were slower offered me more utility. It's multi-faceted, I overstate it too. I like hyperbole :)
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  I'd say the lack of flexible boards isn't really about lane count. A B650(E) board has enough lanes to give you a fast GPU slot, four CPU x4 slots running at 8-16GB/s each, and four chipset x1 slots running at 2GB/s each.
tanelpoder 2y ago
Cool, yep this is just a minor detail and doesn't change what the article itself conveys.

hodgesrm 2y ago

Thanks for a very informative article. It would be interesting have more detail about how EBS achieved a strong culture around quality and system resilience. Maybe a future post?

bravetraveler 2y ago

We may be going full circle with consumer systems being so light for lanes under PCI-e gen5! There's usually enough for a GPU, SSD or two... and that's about it. I don't like having to spend so much for fast IO, dangit. Can sometimes find boards that do switching to appease :/

trueismywork 2y ago
Put your gpu on chipset 8 lane and use a pcie to nvme hub to get upto 7 nvmes
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  I hadn't even gotten into NICs and such yet, though! There was a time when I didn't have to play this game of Tetris
  - lmz 2y ago
    That time was probably when SLI/crossfire was still around so high-end consumer boards had a reason to include plenty of slots for 3 GPUs.
    - bravetraveler 2y ago
      The industry has made a market segment for this/largely ignored it, 'HEDT'. I'd say this is evidence to your point, GPUs being the motivator. I'm starting to think I'm the only one still using add-in NICs, sound cards, or bifurcation. The ATX spec allows for 7 or fewer physical slots. That's not what's letting me down! How many lanes are actually available and their division changes over time. Everything from USB to SATA has internally been moving to PCI-e, there's more 'internal consumption', too. Gen5 is kind of a victim of success. Each individual lane is very fast, but providing them to a fair number of add-in cards/devices isn't practical. Simply physically, but also bandwidth between lanes. Pretty much all of gen4 is nice, those systems are perfectly viable. More lanes that were slower offered me more utility. It's multi-faceted, I overstate it too. I like hyperbole :)
Dylan16807 2y ago
I'd say the lack of flexible boards isn't really about lane count. A B650(E) board has enough lanes to give you a fast GPU slot, four CPU x4 slots running at 8-16GB/s each, and four chipset x1 slots running at 2GB/s each.

tanelpoder 2y ago

Cool, yep this is just a minor detail and doesn't change what the article itself conveys.