Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (66437)	7/23/1999 2:12:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1587800

Who needs AGP 4X anyway? If this is the driving force for DRDRAM, who needs DRDRAM? Think of it: 1. AGP 4X is only needed for games. PROOF: name an application other than a game that requires AGP 2X for satisfactory performance. 2. For the gaming market, graphics card makers are adding more and more memory to graphics cards. Its much cheaper to double the memory on the graphics board than to double the bandwidth of the AGP bus. PROOF: AGP 4X will require doubling the bandwidth of all system memory; this is very expensive. 3. Other than AGP 4X, there is no need to double main memory bandwidth. With full speed L2 cache, memory bandwidth hardly affects performance for non-AGP-intensive applications. PROOF: K6-3 at 66 MHz bus is only a few % slower than K6-3 at 100 MHz bus. Also, Celeron 500 MHz at 66 MHz bus keeps up with a Pentium III 500 MHz with 100 MHz bus, even though it has ONE FOURTH the L2 cache. 4. Point 3 only addressed CPU's with fast L2 caches. However, in the 0.18æ generation, nearly all CPU's will have full speed L2 caches of at least 256K. Main memory bandwidth will not be important until the "multiplier" reaches 7X -- i.e., at 1 GHz for PC133 SDRAM. At that point, it WILL become important, unless the L2 is 512K or greater. Taken together, AGP 4X is a very bad idea. For it to work requires DRDRAM (1.6 GB/sec) main memory bandwidth, the only applications it helps are games, and there are much cheaper solutions for these games such as 1)more graphics card memory and 2)texture compression. Petz