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Originally Posted by Pyrotechnic
I think it's just a lot of newer technology that hasn't caught on yet, take PCI-E for example. A USB 2.0 card for standard PCI can be had for $20 or less. A PCI-E USB 2.0 card is about $50-$60. Theres is absolutely no difference, USB 2.0 is USB 2.0. But just because it's new and isn't very common, it's expensive. Same with PCI-E video cards. AGP is cheaper because it's well established and it's been around for a long time.
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hrm... it's interesting, but is is new, of sorts.
granted, the usb technology itself is completely the same, but the bus it rides on is clearly not.
usb 2.0 is spec'd at 480mb/s. the standard pci bus we've all grown to love (or hate), simply cannot handle that kind of throughput, by a long margin.
by adding it to pci-e, it can actually has enough throughput to maybe hit that mark.
i guess the real answer, which yet i have not come across, is with the new pci/pci-e boards, is the pci-e bus being strangled by the pci bus, or is the pci bus merely along for the ride? _supposedly_ it's a pci-e bus with pci "emulators", if you will.
another interesting point, the way i understood it was that ati was acutally the ones who made actual pci-e cards, and nvidia was simply adding a converter chip on the cards to convert an agp card to pci-e. i have confirmed this with someone i consider highly reliable, but have no paper data to back it up.
it's like the other day i had a client that wanted a system, was building it for a customer of theirs. said the customer needed sata2, because they needed the speed for a server, for which sata1 would not suffice (of course, also wanted ddr2 533... lol).
sure, but the sata2 drives, considering the cost (if you're buying a 250g drive, it's just as cost-effective to buy sata2 as ide), but if you're buying 2x as much drive as you need just to put a sata2 drive on a strangled system, it's kindof a waste.
from what i can tell it's just beating your head against the wall... and all this cool stuff is just going to waste until we can get rid of that damned pci bus. it will probably remain somewhere just as isa, but just as long as it doesn't kill the throughput.