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Other Uses for an AGP Slot?
SleepyHappyDoc asks: "AGP seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, but there's still a lot of slots on legacy motherboards out there. If you don't have need for the graphical advantages of AGP (say, on a headless server), what else could you use the AGP slot for? Could the advantages of AGP over PCI be leveraged in a use other than graphics cards?"
I would think that perhaps you could use the bus bandwidth and an old/slow card to do additional computation. Leverage the GPUs in the more recent AGP 3D offerings and use it for something...uh....usefull :)
Perhaps we can user in a new age of game design where you can load your machine up with older cards to assist with the heavy 3D math for a game, or maybe expose those cards as a virtual machine of some sort.
Blar.
I'm going to have to go with none and move along.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
AGP's architecture makes it unsuited for bi-directional communication. For what it would cost to fabricate an AGP card you could buy a PCI-Express mobo+card.
You could always make try to hack your own peripheral.
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http://www.matrox.com/mga/theguide/contents/AGPvsP CI.cfm
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I want those floatig point numbers faster, damnit.
"Oh boy"
AGP has more downstream bandwidth to the slot than upstream bandwidth from the slot, whereas PCI and PCIe have the same to and from the slot.
You could use it for something like a beefy sound board.. or, something...
No, not much other than graphics output really needs that kind of bandwidth differential.
Since AGP is an acronym for Accelerated Graphics Port, my guess is pretty much nothing except graphics cards can be used in them.
That would let you use the GPU of a video card to do other kind of computational tasks.
/. about a year ago, maybe someone isn't as lazy as me in a sunday afternoon and will care to looj for it.
I can't remember the name, it was posted in
Anyway, AGP is really too 3d graphics specific as to use it for something else. It's designed to let the machine pass enourmous ammounts of information in only one direction.
Maybe back in 98 one would try to reuse old hardware to it's last breath, now, the prices of hardware, and the way they are built (less hacking friendly), makes it easier and cheaper to just buy new hardware, and let the old behind.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I don't know of any non-gfx cards that would use the CPU but there was a C compiler released that would use the GPU instead of CPU for your generic computations (instead of 3d gfx) and for certain kinds of calculations/programs it would be equivalent of 10GHZ P4 class CPU in the means of speed. Look up archives of Slashdot for it.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well, this still involves to use a graphics card, but in a bit different way.
YMMV with the performance though.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
I've wondered about what to do with old AGP cards (and PCI cards) as well. Would there be any way to make an adapter for the new PCIe slots to allow use of old cards? I know physically it would a difficult case fit, but technologically I would not expect it to be too difficult.
With today's high-speed busses, maybe someone could make an external case that accepts old PCI and AGP cards?
AGP is a one-way architecture - the motherboard sends data to the graphics card, the graphics card processes it and sends it to the monitor. The limitations of this way of working are why dual graphics card solutions were never practical on AGP once you started increasing the complexity of the data - the bus wasn't capable enough.
That said, it's not impossible to get it working. You just need to get around the one-way bus problem. There are two obvious solutions for this, to my mind: (ignoring the fact that no cards exist to do it for you)
Use it for one way data
You create a card that acts only to process and send away data. At its simplest, this might be an audio card (without line-in, obviously). Getting slightly more creative, the card could take the 'load' of preparing documents and printing them off the CPU, although I can't see this being useful. Using a rather crossfire-like setup, you could send the output of a suitable graphics card into an input on another, and use it as a pre-processor; at its most basic this could be used to divide a signal in half to be processed by two (or more) cards, or getting more complex it could render something simple - perhaps hidden windows, for use in transparency effects, or perhaps acting as a 2D processor and leaving 3D work to the 'bigger' card - tag this as 'rendered' and send the output to its big brother.To be honest though, this seems a little ridiculous.
Creating a feedback path for 2-way data
This, in my opinion, is where it could be useful. The moment you add a way to send data back - at its simplest, I suppose this would be a SATA or IDE cable and suitable software that continuously reads the contents of the 'hard disk' - you have an opportunity for a specialised processor. The hack would be incredible difficult, granted, but the processor on a graphics card would seem to be well suited to encode video. You send your stream to the AGP card, it converts it to mpeg4 (for example) and sends it back via SATA, taking 99% of the load off the processor. (These cards have recently started to appear for PCIe, so the is definitely a market). With some sort of feedback path, the card could do anything a PCI card can do, but substantially faster thanks to AGP's higher bandwidth - the trick is getting a decent feedback loop.
After all that, though, I think the practical answer is no, there is no use for an AGP slot other than graphics; there is no demand for other cards, so they just don't exist.
It was designed to only ever be used for graphics, and it cannot be used for anything else. True, VLB may have been only for graphics, and yet I've seen the occassionaly scsi card or ethernet nic for it, but it was still more general-purpose. Read up on the AGP docs, and they make it clear... there can be no other uses.
Business card holder? Come on, live on the edge.
something to process boinc packets, and only send back the result?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Leverage is not a verb. Please stop using it as such. See the article posted today about loss of literacy.
-Splat
AGP might be a one-way bus, but if you're planning to run a headless server like GP would suggest – assuming, of course, that most of what it does is sends rather than receives packets, what about having an AGP-based network card that could handle sending more bits at once? And since it's mostly a one-way, maybe a cheaper PCI card exclusively for receiving?
;-) such a thing would be useless anyway...
The only problems with that as far as I can see is that no such card exists, and that unless you have a really wicked high-speed connection (OC-6
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
As it is write only, it is ideal for implementing a hardware /dev/null on Unix systems.
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One of those RAM drives, like you can get now that go into a old PCI slot, and where you can then put your old slower RAM and make it useful again.
replying to self. After that card with the RAM drive, a battery card that plugs into an old PCI slot, that in turn your new AGP slot RAM drive plugs into with a cable, giving you somewhat persistant RAM. The batt gets recharged from the PCI slot somehow,or perhaps it's just a placeholder to put it someplace, and use one of the DC rails to keep it charged.
Many seem to be saying that the AGP has a lot of bandwidth going TO the card but not coming back from the card. This seems well suited to feed uncompressed video to a card in the AGP slot, have the AGP card compress the video into whatever format you wish, and then send back the compressed data.
So how would propose I add another gig when it cannot even accept a single gig?
It does however have a 32mb graphics card that is not used. Oh sure it is a tiny amount of memory but when the kernel is forced to start swapping it makes a difference. Not a huge amount to be sure and it doesn't help at all when it really needs to swap a lot but it gives me just a little bit more room to play with.
Haven't thought about upgrading the card but I guess if I ever see a really cheap 256mb card it might be worth it.
A dual P3 is still plenty fast for desktop use especially since the linux kernel keeps on improving. Windows users may wish to close their ears to save themselve from terminal shock but linux installs get better with age.
Sure sure someday I am going to have to buy a new system and now that dual core chips are here the hurdle is not as big as having to buy a dual single core machine was but still, the longer I can keep this system running the happier I am
Hardware/software hacking is about making stuff go that extra mile. Just plonking a wad of cash on the counter is totally missing the point.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
True, considering AGP stands for "Accelerated Graphics Port".
Your sig is only partly correct "The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!".
The second problem with slashdot is that most of its users are bullied and stuffed into cubicles everyday. -- How are we to make comments on the world when we don't even see it?!
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
As a few people said, GPU could be used for some heavy-duty data processing, especially vector and matrix math. And what to use for output? DVI. It's digital. So you just put the data into AGP, make GPU process it and get the result as three-channel data stream (RGB).
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
You could make a lovely planter out of it. The two tiered pins would make for an exceptionally easy 'layered' approach, maybe some lucious greens in back, and shorter flowering bits in front.
You would simply be the envy of all the other sysadmins in the data center.
-Charlie
P.S. Paint your boxes in pastels to compliment the florals. Black and silver is so 2004.
What sort of operations? Well encrypt/decrypt for a start. A GPU would be a suitable architecture to support an encrypted file system, as it could encrypt/decrypt entire file read/write blocks in place while waiting for disk head movement to settle.
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I'm very tempted to steal that as I quite like it :D
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Simple, I speculate!
:D
No, but seriously, it's easy to comment on the world without seeing it.
What's difficult is to comment ACCURATELY or CORRECTLY
- Other uses for a VESA Local Bus slot?
- Other uses for a Microchannel slot?
- Other uses for an EISA slot?
- Other uses for an ISA slot?
Do we see a trend here?Plants require sunlight, don't you know?
Gotta have'm, 90% of our servers are now running headless(yikes) where have all the monitors gone? As for all the other slots, I guess it was poor planning from the beginning. But if you look at the market as being constantly in the state of BETA! then it all makes fucking sense.... just my two euro cents. Wait a damn, minute, as long as I have been drinking, and can type..Does the fact that MS has stopped support for some OS's now and others soon, that they have finally found all the bugs, and do not need to support their product???
Sig Hansen?
You have the coolest sig ever.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
"No, not much other than graphics output really needs that kind of bandwidth differential."
Serving porn to the Internet.
i think a fan would be an easy way to fill that sucker up.
I think you confused the hardware. It's not an adapter, it's an integrated integrated solution on some ECS motherboards to woo over cheap upgraders. It's an AGP slot soldered to the motherboard, but uses a bridge chip to run over the PCI bus. This means any AGP card you throw at it can't run at full AGP speeds, so it's really no better than an off-center PCI slot. It also means that you'd have to buy a new motherboard to take advantage of it.
Kijori: AGP is a one-way architecture
That's a funny thing to say given that the highest rated post above yours is "VRAM Storage Device" which describes how to use the RAM on an AGP graphics card as block storage.
One-way swap or filesystems just aren't that useful.
Besides, how do graphics cards read textures from system RAM if they can't signal anything back?
Might as well ask, " What other uses are there for VESA Local Bus slots, there seem to be plenty that were made?" It was a hacked PCI slot that has been overtaken by the simplicity of PCI EXPRESS. It like programming towards the 150mhz Pentium Pro, so much potential but why bother when there is so much engineering demand for NEW technologies that are less gimped
I don't think you guys understand the kind of massive speed differential we're talking about. I don't remember the numbers, but it's like G/s to the card and K/s back. It's just enough to tell the processor that the card is ready for the next rendering task, nothing more.
Someone mentioned doing video compression... because you could send the compressed file back. Well ok, except, A. video cards only have 256mb of ram... so your uncompressed video would only be like what 30 seconds? B. getting the data back to the hard drive would be like transfering files over a serial cable... like old PS/2 serial, not USB2 serial.
Now... a card with a SATA out would work. That's the kind of bandwidth that would help, although for most applications just an IDE out would do the trick.
But these cards don't exist. So no... nothing to be done with agp slots.
Combined video - TV Capture cards exist for AGP, such as the Matrox Marvel.
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Where do all these other top-level posters get their information?
w ww.gcsextreme.com/agpfaq.htm for more info. (Sorry, Slashdot's code doesn't want to let me make that into a proper link, it breaks it into 'archive.org' and 'gcsextreme.com' segments, you'll have to copy and paste, then remove the space yourself.)
AGP is a subset of PCI. The original AGP spec (1.0) defined a dedicated slot with a 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI connection directly to the Northbridge, plus the ability to directly access main memory more quickly than conventional DMA allowed. AGP 2x then increased speed by using a double data rate system, similar to DDR memory, transferring two data chunks per clock cycle.
AGP 4x then added a quad data rate connection, Fast Writes (the ability to write to main memory out of normal order,) and Direct Memory Execute (the ability for the AGP card to execute directly out of main memory, rather than having to load into on-board memory first.)
AGP 8x just oct-data rate'd it. It's still 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI, though.
But, either way, AGP *IS* a PCI connection. Fully compliant with PCI 2.1, with full bandwidth in each direction.
There are/were bridge chips that converted the AGP connection into one or more PCI slots, which would become fully-compliant PCI 32-bit, 66 MHz slots. These bridge chips were sometimes used on lower-end server motherboards with onboard PCI video, as a cheaper alternative to adding a separate 64-bit PCI controller. They could be found on products from Intel (L440GX,) and others.
BUT, since it is only 32-bit, you're limited to a 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI connection. PCI-X requires 64-bit for its faster bus speeds. That means that there are no bridge chips that will give you anything better than a 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI 2.1 connection. You can run multiple cards off this connection (As the Intel board listed above did,) but just as with 'regular' PCI, you are sharing the speed among all the cards.
But, any 66 MHz PCI card (or any correctly backwards-compatible PCI-X card,) would take advantage of the doubled speed over 33 MHz PCI, though.
See http://web.archive.org/web/20040205095311/http://
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Well all the better graphics cards are going PCIEx16, the new physics processors are going to be PCIEx1, I cant recall any controller cards so you cant even use it to add more HDs, if you have a legacy MoBo with an AGP (and this has to be pretty legacy at this point, i dont think I have had AGP for 4 years now) just chuck it and buy a new board. Come on, if you're looking at this board then you can probably afford $100 and buy yourself a decent Abit KN-8 Oh I have a use! No card, but you can put another fan in that slot instead. Case closed.
"Say you love us like i know you will and that our deaths won't be in vain or in the name of gasoline"
Out of curiosity; headless as in truly headless or kvm?
Headless as in RS-232 serial. Some chipsets support BIOS mode over an ANSI terminal connected to the RS-232 port and can even translate text-mode writes directly to the video card into the equivalent ANSI terminal codes.
Now all someone needs to make is a BlackBerry sized VT100.
It's still gay though.
First, install a used graphics card. Then reprogram the graphics card to do other stuff.
:)
Any time domain project might work.
eg,
Audio Card. (Yes, you can produce audio on a graphics card).
Signal Generator (All kinds of repetative signals you can generate)
TV Remote (Just connect to a IR led on the output port).
Digital TV Modulator. http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000113073480/ This is the Best idea made practical.
Transmitter (on MANY different frequencies).
Ultrasonic transducer driver for driving 3 ultrasonic transducers. (Spot sound)
Just keep in mind you have 3 Digital to Analogue Controllers,
Programmable clocks
Memory (and a means of moving it to the DACs)
and two other digital outputs,
ALL PACKED NEATLY INTO A VIDEO CARD FORMAT... and it even works with AGP.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Example:
F@ck you!
...for video compression, e.g. the PCI bus would not be the bottleneck, the encoding would be.
...according to the printed tomes of high repute you reference in your post.
Neither are "Googling", "phishing", "modded", or "goatse.cxing", though I've often found them used so in these forums. How attrocious!
I couldn't locate "OP" in my dictionary, but I think you mean to indicate that you aren't the original poster. Since you came to Opie's defense I must retort, offering approriate apologies for your limited role in this squabble. I did some research, and "IMHO", "IANAL", and "AFAIK" are heavily used in Slashdot posts (not unlike "OP"), yet are not to be found in standard printed unabridged dictionaries. Granted, these would be quite ridiculous if used as verbs, but surely any usage of these obscurities represents an offense tantamount to "verbing nouns". Ironically, I do believe "verbing" is not a verb either (that is ever so clever).
[I hope I used "ironically" correctly, because the grammar police are on patrol, and I know this word is so often abused in America, land of un-edumacated*]
I couldn't find "flaming" as a verb, so I am uncertain if it can be righfully used as such. I do know for certain "flaming" can be properly used as an adjective. I love adjectives, and one of my favorites is "pedantic". You were keen to observe this is an informal forum; however, the "OP" was undeniably pedantic in their statement. "Trolling" is indeed a verb, but I don't see any boats on this site, so I'll take the safe alternative and state that the "OP" is a "Troll", by any definition. Muhahahaha*. Hehe*.
* not geniune English words
Trolling is a verb, and it means "To fish for by trailing a baited line behind a slowly moving boat".
Since I see nothing resembling a boat in this forum, please do not claim this poster is "trolling". _Splat is clearly concerned about the daft dialect epitomized by the Slashdot front page. If we are to be taken seriously as the technocratic elite, we must not expose our banality in such a manner.
Following in this spirit of progress, I implore the Slashdot editors to take down that representation of Mr. Bill Gates as a cyborg. I've seen Mr. Gates, and he does not have robotics on his face!
Leverage the GPUs in the more recent AGP 3D offerings and use it for something...uh....usefull
ATi has 24-bit floating point calculations [i.e. 8 bits less than "single precision"]; nVidia & even the new IBM/Sony Playstation Cell processors have only 32-bit floating point calculations [i.e. "single precision"].
Single precision floats are utterly worthless for real-world ["usefull"] calculations; they even lose their integer granularity at 2 ^ 24:
In other words, if you are even moderately wealthy, then graphics FPUs can't keep track of your bank account to the nearest dollar.you could get an agp card that had firewire builtin so if you dont have firewire or a free slot there is your chance if you can find one
I'm pretty sure these guys - http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - are using the CPU for their modeling, but why not the GPU? I think the way the Climate Prediction project (http://climateprediction.net/) works is the software crunches numbers for a while (e.g. how did the weather progress on the morning of June 3, 1811) and then takes a snapshot of the result at periodic intervals. Seems just right for a graphics card, given its modeling strengths and download/upload constraints.
So your points are noted but don't apply to me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
5 years = obsolete? You all need to get a life and appreciate the age you life in. Snot nose kids. " faster faster' .. .
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