Bad idea: a modernized s-100 computer built around pci-e slots
Ok that was a shitpost but really: pci-e has long been in the jank era IMO and we need to fix it
See every interface has an infancy period where compatibility isn't there yet and bugs are still being worked out, then eventually a mature period where it just works well, then a decline when it's been around too long and hasn't yet been replaced, and it's getting janky as we have to come up with strange workarounds for its limitations
And PCIe has been in the jank era for a long while and it's for one reason:
That fucking supplemental power cable that every GPU requires
Like COME ON
It's made worse by the fact that for like 90% of desktop computers, the GPU is the only thing USING the PCIe slots!
So it's become a slot for one thing, GPUs.
Short list of things it can't do: GPUs
Just design "Super PCIe" which is exactly the same but you added another set of traces designed to carry power to GPUs, and you'd fix it.
Be clever with it and you won't even lose compatibility, by just having some way to have an adapter that goes to the PSU
Like, AGP may have been the worst named standard in the entire history of the PC, but at least it had the idea right in making a specialized PCI-but-for-graphics slot.
You could do the same for PCIe! Make AGPe, which is just PCIe but you stuck some more power rails, and it is backwards compatible with PCIe cards.
AGPe is obviously "Additional Graphics Power - Extreme"
I dunno. It's a minor thing but it bugs me. It feels like that era of socket 7 boards where we didn't have fan headers yet so CPU fans were powered by inline molex adapters.
Or those laptop scanners/Webcams/etc that had a keyboard passthru because they were parallel-port based but needed more power, and USB wasn't there yet
Whenever this sort of nonsense happened in the PC industry, it was a clear sign that something janky was happening, and someone had to get clever to make this work, but don't worry, in a couple years we'll figure out the "right" way to do this.
But we've have GPUs in with supplemental power for what, a decade?! Longer?
It's like that period when you could get memory card readers that fit in your floppy drive because USB wasn't there or reliable enough to read SmartMedia cards
It just feels like we're in that "we gotta hack around the limitations of our current tech..." era that can't last long, but for some reason it never ends.
If 90% of what PCIe slots are used for is something that finds PCIe insufficient... Then fix PCIe already!
