What is the AMR slot? 7
Misha asks: "I just started catching up on hardware info, and it seems many new chipsets (Apollo KX133, etc.) and motherboards are supporting this new type of slot. Seems to be a substitute for ISA if you are using it with a sound card or a modem. Not sure what the advantage is, but I assume it has something to do with letting ISA go. Can enlighten me some more about it?"
AMR stands for.. (Score:1)
duh. (Score:1)
Re:duh. (Score:1)
Another advantage is... (Score:1)
Re:AMR stands for.. (Score:2)
The idea of this is to provide cheap add-on modems and sound cards for budget PCs, as these are very cheap to implement when you offload all the processing to the CPU. While these may be good for low-end users, for any serious PC gamer the CPU usage of these solutions makes them unacceptable IMO.
Winmodems (and probably winsound cards) currently have virtually no non-MS OS (Linux, BSD, BeOS) driver support, another reason to avoid them. Personally, I think they're the spawn of the devil, reinforced by my recent exposure to a 56k winmodem that went full speed for 5-10 min before slowing to a crawl.
I don't think it's on the ISA bus; Intel and several other chipset manufacturers are trying to eliminate it (this will provide a small speed boost.) Try looking at some motherboard reviews for more technical details; offhand there's a few at anandtech.com
Re: Open Source support for WinModems (Score:2)
Actually, you can try the LinModem site [linmodems.org] for information and preliminary code for getting your winmodem to do neat stuff under Linux.
There is a bit of code for Lucent based modems allowing you to do full duplex audio. There is also some code for a CL-MD5620DT (Cirrus Logic) which includes code for modem emulation.
What needs to be done is this:
Currently all of this is done in user-space. It would definitely be better to do #1 in kernel space with interrupts instead of polling.
There is already a modem emulator with 14.4 speed and DTMF dialing capability. The only thing it really needs is a bit more work to do v.90 and everything.
Dave.
AMR is... (Score:3)