Joe, <I know there is not much sense to talk about what could have been vs. what is, but on the theoretical level, I think it is a good idea to re-evaluate the quality of decision making at Intel that lead to what is (AGP). I think it was bad, misguided and lacked foresight. Do you agree with that?>
Hindsight is 20/20. Intel designed AGP so that it can be used either as a fat pipe for graphics data or as a tool for UMA graphics architectures. (It says so in the actual AGP spec, though it also said UMA was the primary purpose of AGP.) UMA never panned out like Intel originally thought, but this isn't the first time Intel's crystal ball was inaccurate.
Yet the dedicated fat pipe was found to be very useful. Sure, as such AGP isn't perfect, but improving the main PCI bus would have been inadequate, expensive, and impractical. So would have adding a second PCI channel specifically dedicated toward graphics. In any case, a dedicated point-to-point port for graphics is exactly what was needed, and AGP served that purpose.
Tenchusatsu |
