If support from software houses at Intel’s Visual Computing event last week was somewhat thin, Intel Corp compensated by wheeling out eight graphics chip companies to support its crucial AGP Accelerated Graphics Port technology. 3Dlabs Inc, ATI Technologies Inc, Cirrus Logic Corp, Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp, S3 Inc and Trident Microsystems Inc have all agreed to support the specification, promising to ship systems later this year. AGP is designed to provide graphics accelerators with direct access to memory, avoiding the current PCI bus bottleneck. It’s likely to begin appearing in workstations around mid-year, and according to Intel will dramatically boost graphics performance while slashing system memory costs. Intel also announced a high-speed extension called AGP 4x, primarily aimed at high-end workstations and twice as fast as the current 2x version, which has a bandwidth of 512Mbytes/sec. Intel has plans in place to further boost AGP to a 10x mode over the next three years. The enhancements will be incorporated into the specification by the fourth quarter of this year.
