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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'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!
You could always make try to hack your own peripheral.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
http://www.matrox.com/mga/theguide/contents/AGPvsP CI.cfm
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
GPGPU is what you're looking for.
An adaptor to use AGP cards in PCI slots already exists. It's called AGP express, and is made by ECS. A bridge chip to run AGP in PCIe should also be possible, and I'm sure we'll see one as demand increases.
Hey genius, apparently you have neither encountered "leverage" as a verb nor taken the trouble to make sure you're right, because leverage can indeed be used as a verb.v erage
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=le
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthimeria
An Ask Slashdot post isn't exactly poetry, but using "leverage" as a verb is not only a de facto use of the word, it's also a recognized figure of speech.
This sig rocks the casbah.
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?
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.
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.