Although AGP 8x is available only as a draft specification, there is every chance to see it implemented into some mainboards in the end of the year already. At least we received a word from our reliable sources saying that ALi is currently working on two North Bridges supporting AGP 8x, which are due in Q4 2001. They will be ALi M1661, the first ALi chipset for Pentium 4 in Socket478 form-factor and ALi M1667 – a Socket A chipset for AMD CPUs. Besides AGP 8x, both chipsets will also support PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM as well as PC100/PC133 SDRAM. Moreover, ALi M1661 and ALi M1667 will have a controller for High Speed Link Bus connecting the chipset North and South Bridges. That is why these chipsets will include a new M1563 South Bridge, which will also boast a couple of cool features. Besides the regular set including ATA-100, AC-Link, software modem, 1/10/10Mbit Ethernet and HomePNA, this chip will also support up to 6 USB 2.0 ports and feature SONY Memory Stick interface.
If everything by ALi goes on like this, which, to tell the truth, seems quite hard to believe, taking into account how slow the company was with its DDR chipsets some time ago, then we will be able to buy a mainboard with AGP 8x support in the end of 2002 already. In fact, it is quite hard to predict whether the graphics cards will need 2.1GB/sec data throughput in 9 months. On the one hand, GeForce3 doesn’t seem to suffer from insufficient AGP bus bandwidth. But on the other hand, in 9 months there should appear a new RADEON II from ATI and new graphics solution from NVIDIA with twice as high performance as that of the current GeForce3.
However, even if the new graphics accelerators are able to make use of the entire AGP bus bandwidth, it will hardly make any sense to have this bus in a chipset supporting only PC2100 DDR SDRAM. In this case it will turn out that the AGP bus will have just the same bandwidth as the memory subsystem and hence you will be unable to use AGP 8x to the full extent. Working on a new AGP 8x specification, Intel is first of all caring about its future Dual Channel RDRAM chipset with higher Rambus channel frequency. This chipset is expected to come out mid next year and it will be just the right place for AGP 8x, for sure. And as for ALi, it is most likely to be for marketing purposes rather than for anything else...