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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (121364)	12/8/2000 4:22:04 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tenchusatsu, That was the original premise, but hardly anyone uses that anymore, as I said before. Rather, AGP is used to download textures to local graphics memory. Didn't I mention this before? Ok, if you agree to this, that the only good feature of AGP is that it is a fat pipe for data, wouldn't you agree that that a general purpose established, widely adopted pipe would have been a better solution that starting with non-existent single purpose one? Your point regarding cost is moot, because it has nothing to do with cost of one technology vs. the other, but with the cost of mass market (100M unit) vs. specialized (~1M unit). As far as acceptance of AGP and how everyone accepts it, it's like say swimming from Panama to Europe. AGP started swimming west a long time ago, and at this time it is a better idea to continue swimming west than to reverse course. But it doesn't change anything about the idiocy of the people setting direction at the time. Data always moves from device to memory, or memory to device Good point. I was speculating on PCI -> PCI. First of all, it's expensive to implement 64-bit PCI on a mainstream motherboard. Better to use the extra pins for a dedicated AGP slot, unless you are running a server. I doubt that. Screwing up the northbridge, starting entirely new bus has got to be more expensive than improving PIC (which already had specs for 66/64 well established). Second, 66 MHz PCI is limited to two slots on the bus, as far as I know. Plug in a graphics card, and all you have left is one remaining slot. 2 > 1, or 1 > 0 PCI-X will allow for more slots on the bus at 66 MHz, but PCI-X wasn't around when Intel introduced AGP, and it still hasn't arrived yet. I may be mistaken, but PCI-X is a newer standard, different from PCI 33/66/32/64. And third, PCI has remained "antiquated" because more and more functions are moving off of the PCI bus. This is better than cramming more devices and functions onto PCI, thereby necessitating a move to a more expensive and difficult-to-implement version of PCI. We completed the circle in this argument. PCI remains antiquated because video moved off. Which was my point originally. If video didn't move off, PCI would not be antiquated today. Remember, the original point of PCI was faster video, and the fact that it was general purpose was an added benefit. I have yet to see ONE hardware enthusiast site agree with you these days. Meanwhile you might want to take a look at this Athlon workstation review: proe.com The Athlon 1.1 GHz workstation underperforms in graphics compared to the 900 MHz version. The review attributes this to the disabling of AGP in the 1.1 GHz workstation due to driver issues, and this results in a 50% drop in graphics performance. (Pro/E is a synthetic benchmark, but it's meant to reflect actual graphics workstation tasks.) The link didn;t work for me, but if you read the reviews and go to hardware sites, there remain to be numerous problems with AGP for both Intel and AMD platform. Via has this long running quest to master the AGP, which they have not been able to do in years. Every new motherboard / chipset / graphics board starts life with wide range of AGP problems. In conclusion, I think your extremely negative view on AGP is based on faulty assumptions. I don't know if I'll change your view of AGP, but I hope I can correct some of your assumptions. 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? Joe