Can a HPC running Linux use a card bus pcmcia card?

I often wonder...there must be at least 50 companies worldwide making pcmcia cards, if not 100. How much would it cost to have one of them design and make a card for us hpc lovers? And if possible how much would you be willing to pay for it? $30? $40? $50?

Yes, I know, IBM and HP and NEC are never going to be willing to do it...but there are some small companies out there that...well, they need to eat too... damn, while we are at it...we can just feed the specs of our dream machine to them...well, let's not get carried that far just yet...

But I am serious about the idea of having a card made for us. How many people do you think would be willing to pay $50 for a pcmcia USB card?

Since when are compactflash ports 32bit? If that is so, we should just get a pcmcia adaptor for it.

How can your device support cardbus? I believe that only CE 5/WM5 are the first to support cardbus...

I don't know. The Casio is a ppc2002 device and I was really shocked when I got the
Intel card from Ebay. I made a goof and thought the 2011 and 2011B were both pcmcia. The intel site said the 2011b supported wince so that's why I bought it.

Anyway, downloaded the drivers, installed them and the card and it worked fine. The notch is a cardbus notch and the 2011b won't go into a pcmcia slot, no way no how.

Now it's been mentioned, are CF interfaces 32bit? My math is shaky this early but 16 bit supports 32gb so maybe not. 16k of clusters x 4 sectors/cluster x .5Kb /sector = 32gb

Pengyou, I agree. There are many smalls vendor that would happily run a lot of 1000/10000/100000 cards for the right price. The problem is locating a company and meeting their down payment requirements, paying for the completed batch, then selling the costs and recovering the costs in a reasonable time.

I'll bet (from being in manufacturing before) that Ratoc has paid no more than $5-10US for each CF USB card that was made for them. Any higher would be a risky undertaking and any less is just proving just how greedy capitalism can be

I'm seeing a huge number of 4 port USB 2 pccards on ebay this week for $5US, which means they likely cost 50 cents to manufacture.

Very good point about CF USB being available!

CF cards only have a 16 bit data bus. I'm assuming that the USB CF card uses ATA IO mode, so I can't see how a CF card could give more bandwidth than a PCMCIA card... I seem to recall that the limit of CF is less than 32GB, but CF+ is 137GB: it all gets a bit confusing because there's so many different revisions of the spec. Either way, I think the 32GB that you mention is a red herring as that's addressing as opposed to data access.

My guess is that there's a limit on how many full speed devices can be connected otherwise the bus would be overwhelmed.

I do wonder if this would work in a 16 bit PC Card slot with a CF adaptor: I can't think why not.

It should be fine in a pcmcia slot, and would probably have a larger bus to go along too. I just wish that we could find a pcmcia usb card...

if it will not fit into a type II slot it is a type III. that refers to the thickness of the card and has nothing to do with cardbus, it is a different thing. a cardbus pcmcia is often type II so it will fit in any hpc's pcmcia slot just fine. it just won't work as there's no hardware and software support it
some hpc's support pcmcia type III, but they won't cardbus of course.

can you show me some pic of the card, all that i found were just 16 bit ones i'm curious

Edited by cmonex 2006-01-10 9:39 PM

You know, I just used an old compaq laptop from the ME days ('99), and it had a cardbus slot. I am starting to feel seriously left out.

It was a compaq too!

The reason why there is no CardBus support for most CE devices is very simply because most CPUs that run CE do not have built-in support for it.

For example, even the latest Intel XScale processors do not support CardBus. Here's a page to the PXA255 for illustration purposes:
http://www.intel.com/design/pca/prodbref/252780.htm
The features table lists PCMCIA among other things. If you look at the block diagram, you will notice near the corner on the right, there is a PCMCIA/CF controller right there.

What does this mean? It means to have PCMCIA/CF support, all you need to add to your XScale-based device is the physical sockets and connect them to the CPU. All the circuitry to drive the PCMCIA bus is already included in the PXA255. Cool huh.

Does that mean it's impossible to add CardBus? Not at all. It's only a matter of an external chip - a 32-bit controller for the CardBus. And of course write a driver for your OS.

Only one problem tho: our CPUs (especially RISCs) have more important things to do than to deal with a 32-bit bus that don't really offer much help. So stop dreaming, CardBus won't be on PDAs, no more likely than USB 2.0 Hosting and WiFi G.

Oh, that stuff will be on PDA's sooner than you would expect. Just not on our H/PC's.

all of this stuff is already there. at least in CE 5.
also, there's a wlan g CF card for earlier pda's too (not that it is faster)

Edited by cmonex 2006-01-21 11:07 AM

Just because it's in CE5 doesn't mean it will be in any devices...

My guess is that it is supported for x86 based machines (x86 has built-in PCI support, and CardBus can be added easily thru that). Unless Intel goes crazy, I do not think their ARM processors will have built-in CardBus support any time soon. And because CardBus is so fast, there's little chance it'll be put into a co-processor either. It prolly requires a seperate controller.

And don't forget, CardBus isn't totally helpful for CE anyway. Sure most laptops still support it, but some of the smallest already ditched it. There is currently no PDA that supports PC Cards either. So what good is CardBus?

Yes I know the G card. I almost bought one myself. But I was referring to built-in WiFi. Even the newest PDAs come with B spec only, and there is no sign of that changing any time soon.

i just wanted to mention CE5 supports it.

any x86 supports pci? thought x86 is just an architecture, but if that means it must include specific hardware support too, then i didn't know enough about this

i have seen future pda / phone models that will support G (or maybe some of them is already manufactured.) sorry forgot which ones. think it had a phone module too. we'll see if that realizes. but at least it's a sign

I prefer pda's running on different processors than pc's, you know, so that they are still pda's and not pc's?

I can definitely see an embedded xp system getting a virus.

Oops, my mistake again
What I meant to say was that the Intel x86 chips support PCI. Specifically, PCI was introduced in the Pentium, which was carried on to all Intel x86 chips to this day

Putting it back in context, I was saying that CE supporting CardBus was probably for certain CPUs that have it. As far as I can tell the only CE-compatible CPUs that can easily add support for CardBus would be the modern x86 chips. That is because they usually have support for PCI, which can be bridged to CardBus