PCI Express System Architecture

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Summary: Pci Express System Architecture
Review: (...)I spent a couple of days trying to use this book and found engineering inforamation and details lacking as much as they are lacking in the spec. I am looking at other references for engineering help.

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Summary: Paul L from Chandler AZ.
Review: As always, Mindshare applies its unique style of simplification to a complex specification. PCI Express is the future interconnect for small and large scale compute platforms. The clean approach Mindshare brings to PCI Express specification provides a clear and concise guide to the detail operational parameters needed by both software and hardware designers. It's a must have for those who which to get a jumpstart using this latest interconnect technology.

Well Done!

Rating:
Summary: Paul L from Chandler AZ.
Review: As always, Mindshare applies its unique style of simplification to a complex specification. PCI Express is the future interconnect for small and large scale compute platforms. The clean approach Mindshare brings to PCI Express specification provides a clear and concise guide to the detail operational parameters needed by both software and hardware designers. It's a must have for those who which to get a jumpstart using this latest interconnect technology.

Well Done!

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Summary: PCI Express System Architecture
Review: I was disappointed by this book. It took a lot of time to explain the basics of the spec but did not provide any additional design help or expanded technical info. I have had mixed results with other books for other buses in this series and this one is no better. If you carefully read the spec you will get about 97% of what is in this book. In several places the book simply uses parts of from the spec. directly. I wish the book took the time to create better figures and tables than what is in the spec. The spec is very poor on figures and tables and to use any portion of them is just a short cut in writing the book. I really wanted a book that either did not require reading the spec or a book that redid all of the poorly drawn or written parts of the spec. Also the spec is not very well organized, the book did a little bit better than the spec. in that category, but not as much as it should have. Again, it seems like a lot of short cuts were taken and no effort was made to really provide more detailed or organized information than the minimum. Perhaps that was the purpose of the book, but that is not what is needed. I just do not understand all of the positive reviews, unless the reviewers did not carefully read the spec. and did not know better. I just did not want to pay for shortcuts in the writing.

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Summary: PCI Express System Archtiecture
Review: In my opinion it is simply a re-write of the specification with no additional insight into the design of PCI Express hardware or software. In fact it follows the specification in the lack of design useful flow charts for hardware and the lack of detailed hardware figures. It provides little design information over what you can read in the specification and many of the figures are just those of the specification or look alike. The link states are done in the same manner as the specification with only minor additional information and there is no architectures of different ways the components can be built. It takes a lot of pages to explain some fairly simply concepts and wastes about 100 pages on third party information and restating waveform information from the specification. It has no glossary of terms and only a five page index.

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Summary: PCI Express System Architecture/MindShare
Review: PCI Express System Architecture by MindShare is simply a continuation of a great series of books. I have a complete set starting with their first release of ISA System Architecture back in the 80's.

What makes this new book beneficial is that it really helps design engineers like myself to better understand a specification that's really not written with "design" in mind. Not to bash the PCI-SIG, but it's not in their charter to step engineers through design, rather they inform us about what these new interconnects entail and their strengths over previous architectures. MindShare takes over in this missing "education" area with their broad ranging books and classes.

PCI Express System Architecture starts with a comprehensive overview of previous architectures, like PCI, 66Mhz/64bit PCI, PCI-X, DDR/QDR PCI-X. For a design engineer who's used to understanding old school North/South bridge chipsets, they now get a proper and clear introduction to Root Complexes, Switches, and newer I/O hubs.

Other strengths of this book include an excellent section on the explanation of PCI Express's new QoS as well as both traffic and virtual classes.

Physical layer is also explained well, broken into a logical chapter and electrical chapter. Complete transmitter and receiver characteristics are explained well. These are vital numbers to know for any PHY level designer.

Link Training, Hot Plug, and Power Management chapters have been written in great detail and are clear and easy to understand.

For those engineers who are designing add-in cards, this book also covers all the important connector pin-outs and signals, all the way up to x16 lane widths.

My only wish is a more comprehensive section on Spread Spectrum Clocking, but you can't ask for everything....

Good Job MindShare!

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Summary: book review
Review: This book is informative for system architect and designer for the PCI express. It explains the pros and cons of different bus architecture based on the PC system in clear, concise language and easy to understand. The PCI express protocol is also well explained.

Rating:
Summary: book review
Review: This book is informative for system architect and designer for the PCI express. It explains the pros and cons of different bus architecture based on the PC system in clear, concise language and easy to understand. The PCI express protocol is also well explained.

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Summary: PCI Express Book Review
Review: This book provides an another resource in addition to the PCI Express Specification. This is helpful since I'm at a small company where no one else is working on PCI Express at the moment. The book is well written and well organized. It is useful to me as a system architect as well as the other guys in my group who will be the designers on our next ASIC project.