PCIe and AGPe

[Wahsapa]

i was reading this review from t-break of an albatron motherboard that had a PCIe AND an AGP slot. cool stuff to say the least.... but it got me thinking...

nvidia uses an HSI chip grafted onto the non-PCIe native graphics card to convert the AGP bus to PCIe and vice versa, or something along thoes lines, so my idea is this....

could you impliment the HSI chip on the motherboard level to create a AGP slot? say taking 4x pcie lanes, slapping the HSI chip on them to convert thoes 4x lanes to make an AGP slot/bus?

on the albatron board only certain graphic cards from nvidia and ati will work. would an HSI chip get any card to work? would you have to program a chip for every card? or can the chip automatically convert any AGP signal to PCIe?

 

[johnny1111]

I don't know, but I'll give this a bump up. I'd like to here more. -john

 

[ViRGE]

My understanding is that due to timing issues, the HSI chip has to be as close as possible to the GPU, so I don't believe it would work, but putting it right next to the Northbridge might pull off the same effect. It'll never happen though, since the HSI chip would cost as much as the whole motherboard chipset itself.

 

[LifeStealer]

Even if it were done it would hamper system performance.

 

[Wahsapa]

thanks for the feed back :thumbsup:

how much do HSI chips cost? i thought they were cheap.

 

[The Green Bean]

Why can't there be AGP 16x?

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
thanks for the feed back :thumbsup:

how much do HSI chips cost? i thought they were cheap.

I've seen it mentioned that each HSI chip is costing NV $20 in the end. Whole chipsets aren't much more expensive than that.