I wonder if the idea was bad, or just that the PCI+VLB boards tended to be last dregs of the 486 market, where the selling point was "The system integrator can clear out his cabinets of rapidly obsolescing VLB cards" or "the person in a weirdly budget-constrained upgrade can avoid replacing the VLB video card". They weren't competing for the premium market and probably cut other corners; this was after all the era of fake cache.
The PCI chipsets of this time were really really buggy, that's why.
They got better as time went on but it really took a number of years before people could get reasonably high-performance, reliable PCI implementations. For x86, aside from AMD's Irongate (750/760) chipsets (K7-era) and nVidia (nForce), pretty much only Intel had PCI working reasonably. ALI, VIA and SiS PCI implementations always had weird issues and quirks.
PCI-IDE adapters are another good example -- VIA's PCI IDE had all sorts of issues, if you wanted high performance PCI IDE, it worked best with Intel.
It's not that different with modern PCIe-SATA either (history repeats), Marvell PCIe/SATA adapters have lingering oddities.
hakfoo|2 years ago
vrinsd|2 years ago
They got better as time went on but it really took a number of years before people could get reasonably high-performance, reliable PCI implementations. For x86, aside from AMD's Irongate (750/760) chipsets (K7-era) and nVidia (nForce), pretty much only Intel had PCI working reasonably. ALI, VIA and SiS PCI implementations always had weird issues and quirks.
PCI-IDE adapters are another good example -- VIA's PCI IDE had all sorts of issues, if you wanted high performance PCI IDE, it worked best with Intel.
It's not that different with modern PCIe-SATA either (history repeats), Marvell PCIe/SATA adapters have lingering oddities.