by Anna Filatova
05/27/2002 | 11:40 PM
While the largest semiconductor manufacturer promises us support of AGP 3.0 in its upcoming products in the year 2003, the progress keeps going and the other chipset and graphics chips makers do not keep their hands in pockets. They intend to announce corresponding solutions in the nearest future already.
SiS has been showcasing its SiS648 since March already. Among other cool features, this chipset also supports AGP 8x. it is expected to be officially announced on the upcoming Computex show. Another Taiwanese chipset developer, VIA Technologies, has already launched its P4X333 chipset, which also said to support new AGP version. And even NVIDIA, which is a relatively new name in the chipset market, is also planning to release a new nForce2 in autumn, which will surely support the new AGP as well. Of course, we should also mention AMD, which announced long time ago already that its AMD 8xxx chipset series for Hammer processors would be able to work with AGP 8x protocol.<%BANNER[article]%>
As for the graphics chips developers, here we can also see the new standard coming into life smoothly. SiS has already announced its Xabre GPU, which is considered the world’s first AGP 8x compatible chip, even though it is designed for the Low-End market. According to some unofficial info published by Hardware.Fr, NVIDIA, the today’s largest graphics chips supplier, will introduce new versions of its GeForce4 Ti and GeForce4 MX supporting AGP 8x during Computex 2002. ATI Technologies is also rumored to be announcing a new mass product compliant with the new protocol.
Moreover, starting from mid summer and up to autumn we will see Matrox Parhelia-512, 3Dlabs P10, NVIDIA NV30 and ATI R300 coming out one by one. And I will not be surprised, if they require higher bandwidth than that offered by AGP 4x now for proper operation.
As we see, the industry keeps moving forward, and strange as it might seem, but Intel is falling behind it. On the other hand, the industry sometimes cannot catch up with Intel as well, especially in the CPU field. This is parity, sirs!