The Inquirer discloses that the “bridge chip” nVidia is going to use to make AGP cards work in PCI Express slots goes both ways. Later, it can be used to make native PCI Express cards work in AGP.
Woody Allen once said, “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night” and when it comes to mating with your wallet, this ought to hold true even for video cards.
We’ll have to see how much the bridge chip hurts performance, but unless there’s a huge hit (which seems very unlikely), this ought to leave nVidia in the AGP market by hook or by crook for some time to come, which might be especially good a generation or so down the road when the level of performance achieved by the newest cards ought to percolate down to reasonable price levels.
That means that if you feel pressured to buy an expensive card right away because of the advent of PCI Express, you can relax about it.
The article also says that ATI effectively has a bridge chip, though its orientation remains unknown. 🙂
Just to get this out of the way, when it comes to things like bridge chips and the like, so long as they work, and the end result is faster than the alternative, we care about not how but how much gets done. Paradox notwithstanding, we find those who find such things unacceptable because it violates their sense of technical elegance to be . . . kind of gay. 🙂
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