[ale] Competition for Intel PII

[andy]

Technology Update!

Advanced Micro Devices has announced that they have licenced Digital's
EV6 bus technology. Currently used for Alpha CPU's.  This system bus is
supposedly
superior to Intel's slot 1 bus.  It incorproates a full 64 bit frontside
bus and a
whopping 128bit backside bus. and supports a level3 cache. AMD claims
they
will use this bus for their K7 which will be capable of 500MHz and above
and
will incorporate 3D on-chip support.

You no longer have to purchace a PentiumII motherboard to get AGP
Support.
The VIA Apollo VP3 chipset supports AGP for socket7. This means that if
you
already have a Pentium, PentiumMMX, K5, K6MMX, or Cyrix/IBM 6x86 based
system, all you need is a new motherboard with the VP3 chipset.

The FIC PA2012 Is the first such board I could find which has the AGP
slot.
This VP3 supports 2MB of cache and the PA2012 has 1MB on board.
This board is ATX form factor so an ATX case is necessary.

The VIA Chipset brings most of the PII technology to socket7.  The Intel

TX chipset does not have AGP support and will only cache 64MB of RAM
this means that If you use more that 64MB in a TX system, performance
will suffer. TX only supports 512k of cache.

/home/andy