Yet another new graphics bus!

[LrngToFly]

Christ- I haven't even seen an AGP Pro 4x card yet!

from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/000214-000024.html

Intel will, this week, also roll out details of its future graphics bus, dubbed Beyond4X. This is being developed in cooperation with a number of third parties including Diamond, Nvidia, S3, 3DFX, and Intense 3D, she said.

[Snake-Eyes]

But will the slots be backwards compatible, for those of us that need to upgrade a piece at a time?

I'm betting Intel tries to force a changeover all around, just like with the move from socket7 to slot1. ;-)



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Ace

[Targon]

The new graphics standard is probably an Intel backup plan, just in case they can't catch up again in the CPU wars Intel is known for trying to change the architecture, just to force others out of the market. Remember socket7? AMD was about to release a competitive product(the K6), when suddenly, Intel comes out with Slot-1. They couldn't stand the thought of competing with CPU vs CPU, so made it an architecture vs architecture battle. So, we have AMD going with EV6 bus for the 200MHz bus speed(100MHz x 2). Intel sees this, and now is going to try to go for a 200 x 2 approach from what we've been hearing. Now they are trying to make a new graphics standard. This shows that Intel KNOWS they may very well lose in the CPU speed race, so are doing what they can to develop Intel proprietary system designs.

[Himself]

1.5GHz

[dOOMY]

1.5GHz means nothing but marketing. Altough I hope it's not just marketing.

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Never underestimate the power of human stupidity

[Thundrchez]

Targon, it is not as simple as you put it. Intel already had the P6 bus in production with the PPro a good bit before the K6 was released. It was a socket 8 connector, but it talked on the same bus as the slot-1 cpus.

Yes, Intel does like minimizing the upgrade path that you can select. It is better for them if you have to buy a new mobo and a new cpu. Then they made you buy new cases so that you can use atx mobos to upgrade your ol at layout mobo... yuck yuck yuck. Why not make us buy a new mobo to get the latest agp/video slot?

[Taz]

If the recent legal battles are anything to go by I think Intel's main reason for releasing yet another standard is so they don't loose any more money from rival chipsets. Due to the problems with the i820 chipset VIA's sales must have increased dramatically especially as they could support a 133mhz bus. If of course Intel are the only manafacturer who produce a chipset which supports this new standard then they have a monopoly and VIA are stuffed. The knock on affect of this is AMD, who are relying on VIA to produce chipsets for their processors, are going to have trouble selling Athlons if none of the motherboards which support it work with the next generation video cards.

[Greebe]

Don't forget AMD is producing chipsets themselves. They have been working hard to get here and I doubt they'll idlely sit by and allow VIA to make the mistakes that have plagued them in the past.

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