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Intel exiting graphics chips market
KEM writes "According to this
news piece, Intel is giving up on the graphics market " They are going to still make integrated chipsets, but will no longer be making discrete graphics chips. Intel chalks it up not being able to keep up with the other chip makers, despite their purchase of Chips and Technologies in 1997, which was supposed to give them that edge.
They have even released the specs on the THREE-D portions of their latest cards, thus guaranteeing that hardware accelerated OpenGL for Linux for the Matrox cards is just around the corner (with XFree86 4.0). NVidia and 3dfx won't do that, saying that keeping their 3d engine secret gives them a 'competitive advantage'. 3dfx cards work in OpenGL mode under Mesa only because of the proprietary GLIDE libraries, where 3dfx munificently allowed someone under non-disclosure to port GLIDE to Linux (as closed source).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The current PCI bus spec tops out at 33Mhz. The current AGP bus spec tops out at 66Mhz. Intel now has a 66Mhz PCI spec (i.e., just as fast as AGP), but a) it is currently available only in their latest motherboard, and b) in that motherboard, it requires eliminating the AGP slot. As for 64-bit PCI, both Compaq and AMI have motherboards that do 64-bit PCI with Intel 32-bit processors. Remember that the width of the bus does not have to be the same as the width of the processor... for example, current chipsets already have a 64-bit bus to main memory, and serialize it to a stream of 32-bit words when it comes time to present the data to the processor. And some Alpha motherboards have busses as wide as 256 bits to main memory, and again, serialize it to a stream of 64-bit words when it comes time to present the data to the (64-bit) processor.
A year ago Linux did not support the 64-bit PCI spec even on Alphas (which did have 64-bit PCI slots even back then). But I have not checked things out lately, too many other fun things to do and I'm not in that business anymore.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Yeah, I just sold my NVDA today! What a pleasant surprise! Any idea why all that happened?