Motherboard buses are long and hard to manipulate in a cramped space. It's easy to shove things in badly or not at all and they take up a lot of space. Given a fir tree shape, each branch could provide two lines, there would be no way anything could be inserted in the wrong place and the interface would be shorter.
That's it.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 21 2009

there really should be a law protecting us from the use of the word christmas before december. sorry 19 -1
-- po, Aug 21 2009


OK, i'll alter it.
Edit: Done.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 21 2009


//christmas// *Christmas

Brings a whole new meaning to Branch Circuits...
-- silverstormer, Aug 21 2009


HI SILVER!

+1, 19
-- po, Aug 22 2009


I'm not sure I get it. Are you talking about a motherboard with expansion slots on both sides?
-- phoenix, Aug 22 2009


Rubs eyes, sees po, then looks up...yay oh yay...sliverstormer!!!

The idea...yes, and with colored lights and an angel at the top at mistletoe time. (Hahahahaaaa).
-- blissmiss, Aug 22 2009


OK, probably shouldn't've posted this before sodding off for a week. Therefore, i'm fully expecting this anno to be justifiably ignored.
I have in mind a socket sitting upon the motherboard which looks a little like a network or 'phone jack, into which a card with a male version of the same can be inserted, with an option of sticking the thing on the edge of the board for external access. Given a fir tree shape, there could be at least four lines per branch, eight lines per level and therefore a more compact arrangement which would be easier to insert.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 29 2009


So it's flat? A picture would be helpful. Keep in mind that for some high speed circuitry, trace length is important.
-- csea, Aug 29 2009


I like backplane designs: mine actually has a trunk to which 4 cards are connected, each of which may have some smaller cards attached so obvious [+] for "great minds..." (give or take card orientation).
-- FlyingToaster, Aug 29 2009


I'll link to a picture once i can turf the offspring off the desktop. Yes, i'm conscious of the timing problem, but would this apply to all peripherals?
-- nineteenthly, Aug 29 2009


only peripheral I can think of offhand that might be affected by buss length of that magnitude would be the graphics card on high-powered gaming or rendering machines.
-- FlyingToaster, Aug 29 2009


Wow, your kid has been on the computer for a long time.

It sounds like this would be far more expensive than the current edge connectors, but I await a picture of some sort.

Timing constraints necessitating carefully controlled trace lengths apply to any peripheral using a bus that has such requirements (e.g. PCIe), regardless of whether that device personally needs to transfer data at such a high rate.
-- notexactly, Aug 30 2019



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