PCI Express

[Sham B]

It's just removing a future bottle neck before we hit it.

You wouldn't like it if your house was only wired to support 10 x
60watt lighbulbs and you needed a complete rewire and new fuse board
when you wanted to a brighten up a few rooms with 100watt bulbs!

D0d6y.

Yeah, and assuming you only used about half the house at the moment, with the other rooms empty....
and house prices always went down instead of up.

Q why move because of a vague theoretical need to do so?
A to keep estate agents in a job



S

 

[J. Clarke]

It's just removing a future bottle neck before we hit it.

You wouldn't like it if your house was only wired to support 10 x
60watt lighbulbs and you needed a complete rewire and new fuse board
when you wanted to a brighten up a few rooms with 100watt bulbs!

However the current situation is the opposite, right now we're not running
on the ragged edge of what AGP can do, as test after test has shown, we're
using at most half its capacity.

The real push behind it is that Intel wants to sell chipsets and force Via,
SiS, etc to play catch-up. Don't kid yourself that anybody is going to see
a real performance improvement from it any time soon. Maybe 5 years down
the road, but by that time Intel will be trying to kill it off in favor of
some new marketing standard.

Remember all the wonderful things that Slot 1 was supposed to do that
couldn't possibly be done with a socket? The only wonderful thing it did
was allow Intel to prevent their interface from being cloned long enough to
lock AMD into a different interface. When Intel is pushing some new
standard put one hand on your wallet and the other on your pistol because
you're about to be robbed.

Now, there are some real reasons to want a faster PCI--the current version
can't keep up with gigabit Ethernet for example. But the simple fact is
that the rest of the machine can't keep up with it either unless you've got
it specified to the standards of at least a midrange server, so the PCI bus
is not the bottleneck there in any but a few specialized applications. The
claim is that a PCI-Express machine will give the same performance as a
PCI-X machine for less money. However the PCI Express slots being put in
the first generation of machines do not match the performance of PCI-X and
I would be very surprised if the first generation of PCI Express boards
sold for less money than the current generation of PCI-X boards.

 

[McGrandpa]

If you want to see what sort of speed improvement you might get, try
setting your AGP speed to 4X in the bios, run 3dmark2001 (or
whatever) and then set the bios back to 8X and try again. I think
you'll find it makes hardly any difference at all.

Now one argument is that games authors will start to make games that
need huge amounts of textures that just won't fit in the graphics
card memory and which need to be paged in from system memory. This
would be a very bad thing if they did. But if they did this, then
the faster PCI-Express bus speed would help. But we'd be loading
textures from slow system memory (which means god forbid it might
even have to get paged in from your swapfile!!!). I just can't see
this being at all viable.

So given that not much traffic is going to be travelling across the
bus, then I can't see how speeding it up will make games run faster.

Chip.

Hi Chip.

I think it's because a certain CPU maker who also makes chipsets and
mobos is stomping up and down on the issue like a spoilt kid not getting
their way and find the only other Big Kid is smoothly sliding right on
past them performance wise....

and Intel can't figure out what to do about it....so....PCIExpress
McG.