It is funny, but apparently the history with the introduction of the new AGP standard is repeating with every step in AGP evolution. In May 1999 NVIDIA introduced their TNT2 graphics chip that supported AGP 4x. Later came ATI Technologies with their Rage 128Pro, S3 with Savage 2000, etc, all supporting the new protocol. That time there were no chipsets for mainboards to support the AGP 4x. In September 1999 VIA Apollo Pro133A and i820 were introduced. The former brought the unforeseen popularity to VIA Technologies due to the reason that the latter remained as prerogative of workstations and expensive machines from major PC-Vendors.

We now have very same situation. We see RADEON 9700PRO, GeForce4 MX/Ti with AGP 8x support, we expect NV30 to come this year and we have SiS Xabre as the first supporter of the new protocol. On the other side of the industry we see VIA KT400, VIA P4X400, SiS648 supporting AGP 8x now and expect for Intel`s code-named Granite Bay core-logic to come in late October. Yesterday we reported that SiS and VIA only serve 36.3% of the market (see this news-story) and their high-end products supporting the latest features do not account the largest portion of their shipments. Thus, again, there are not a lot of AGP 8x supporting mainboards around. Granite Bay is proposed to workstations and will not be spread widely on the market.

By the second quarter 2003, most of chipsets from VIA and SiS are going to support new AGP protocol. Furthermore, the newest core-logic devices from AMD (AMD-8000) and Intel (Springdale) are also going to bring AGP 8x to the masses in the first and the second quarters accordingly. By the third quarter 2003, we will see AGP 8x supporting ATI’s R350, the new Parhelia, the updated P10 VPU, maybe even new graphics processors from SiS and VIA/S3 Graphics. As for now, we have graphics chips developers running in front of the train to declare something new whether it is needed or not. The history repeating.