Other Uses for an AGP Slot? 160
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?"
Running a vintage AGP card? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Running a vintage AGP card? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only in IT could something that was state-of-the-art five years ago and a clear industry standard even a couple of years ago possibly be described as "vintage" today. :-)
Re:Running a vintage AGP card? (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. But as long as enough users buy the new "standards", the industry has zero interest in defining something that lasts.
Re:Running a vintage AGP card? (Score:2)
Ummm..fashion industry and wines come to mind. And that car you drive? that was so last century. Medical prosthetics, pharmacology, particle accelerators...may be a few more out there. Granted, they wouldn't have advanced without the rather astounding advances in IT over the last few, but IT isn't the only porpoise in the bow wake.
Re:Running a vintage AGP card? (Score:2)
Graphics FPUs are worthless. (Score:2)
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:
As I don't know of any AGP cards that aren't gfx.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As I don't know of any AGP cards that aren't gf (Score:1)
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?!
Re:As I don't know of any AGP cards that aren't gf (Score:2)
No, but seriously, it's easy to comment on the world without seeing it.
What's difficult is to comment ACCURATELY or CORRECTLY
No. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
so a seti@boinc gpu? (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:2)
No, but it will be far less useful than the same cluster with several gigabit or faster connections, which would be far more appropriate for such a cluster.
In any event, your motherboard that has an unused (?) AGP port probably also has PCI ports. Since the only AGP cards that I've ever heard of have been graphics cards, and you need a fast connection to something, I'd suggest just us
Re:No. (Score:2)
Alternatively take a good 3D-accelerated gfx card off the shelf, never plug anything in the card's outputs and write your own custom software to use the card's GPU. It will be severely limited it data rate back, but that's not a show-stopper. There are tasks where this is pretty useful - hashing algorithms return
Re:No. (Score:2)
With a faster, dedicated bus like AGP, products like this would allow for faster data rates, with the speed not throttled by other devices or instruments in the same PC.
However, these exact same bene
Well (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:2)
As I understand it, the AGP spec would be much harder to do at home. If anyone knows of anybody with a homebrew AGP design, I would love a link.
Accelerated Graphics Port (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Accelerated Graphics Port (Score:1)
Wow, matrox could update their documentation a little...
More PCI-E cards (Score:1, Insightful)
I want those floatig point numbers faster, damnit.
Very limited usage, maybe (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Very limited usage, maybe (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Very limited usage, maybe (Score:2)
Bulky strings in, nice, lean SAX events out.
Re:Very limited usage, maybe (Score:2)
Re:Very limited usage, maybe (Score:2)
Re:Very limited usage, maybe (Score:2)
But I suppose if all of your PCIe or PCI-X slots are already in use by RAID controllers, you could make use of the AGP. Although, if that's the case you definately have some $1000+ in RAID controllers alone, plus a
There was this project ... (Score:2)
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
Re:There was this project ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There was this project ... (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure ISPs around the world are using AGP to link home users up to cable and DSL internet.
Re:There was this project ... (Score:2)
Asyncronous connections sucks
Co-CPU. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Co-CPU. (Score:1)
because they lack branch prediction skillz
i read it somewhere dont remember where so i dont know if this info is valid
Re:Co-CPU. (Score:2)
Re:Co-CPU. (Score:2)
Re:Co-CPU. (Score:2)
That's a reasonable hypothetical definition, but in practice there is no such thing [wikipedia.org].
VRAM Storage Device (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this still involves to use a graphics card, but in a bit different way.
YMMV with the performance though.
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
Sigh you make a lousy hacker (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sigh you make a lousy hacker (Score:2)
well, you could break out the solder, and a bread board, and pick up a memeory controller that can work across a pci bridge, preferably as an ide/scsi controller, and of course a memory socket or two (depepnding on the memory controller you picked out) and then , on boot up initialize that ram as a swap drive, using something like norton ghost, or dd
except I don't do KDE I do XFCE (Score:2)
So your points are noted but don't apply to me.
Re:Sigh you make a lousy hacker (Score:2)
Bullshit. I use KDE3.5, and I have never managed to make the system reach 512MB mem-usage with KDE. With several apps (Konqueror, Kontact, Konsole etc.) the system consumes about 140MB total. If I load a metric assload of apps (KDE-apps, mind you), I can push the mem-consumtpion to about 350MB.
As it happens, I have used KDE3.4 on a system with 320MB of RAM, and it worked fine. Well, it was a bit slow at loading apps, but
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:1)
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:1)
True, it wouldn't be much point purchasing a graphics card to use for this kind of purpose, but if one has already a graphics card left over, it could be put into use in this way.
And a gig for $50 USD? I'd love to see such low prices over here in the People's Republic of Sweden... Can't be had for lower than $101 USD currently, after searching for the lowest prices. Sigh.
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
In fact my 286 has one that was used as a RAMdisk, effectively doubling performance.
Of course, in that era we were talking adding between 2mb and 8mb, and being happy to have it!
Re:VRAM Storage Device (Score:2)
Not a lot (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not a lot (Score:2)
Re:Not a lot (Score:1)
Re:Not a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No.
AGP is a two-way, point to point architecture that has a single master and a single target. Data can be written to and read from the graphics card memory, but you can't exercise the full range of PCI I/O operations. The data transfer rates are asymmetric, with sending data to the card greatly favored over reading data from the card, but they are most certainly two-way.
The SLI argument is a lesser error, if you would even call it that. You could have, but never as far as I know actually did have two AGP busses in a system. Thus I suspect that it would have been possible to do SLI with AGP, especially when you consider that existing implementations of SLI require an additional card-to-card link, which means (likely, this last part is speculation) that there is very little return data being transmitted from the cards back to the PCI express switch beyond that which you would see in a single card system, whether it is PCI express based or AGP based.
AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
AGP cards can be run in PCI mode, which just slows them down.
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
I had a motherboard with 3 VLB slots and 3 standard ISA slots.
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Well, if you strip away the DAC, GPU, and other non-memory components of an AGP card, you can still use the AGP port as a rudimentary memory expansion port using the Linux MTD driver. [linuxnews.pl]
Good if you
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
It's even more grating, considering that you didn't even bother to read the original question, which is asking about it in a way that tends to make one thing he is asking about *hardware*. So don't go crying to mommy, go crying to your remedial english teacher,
Re:AGP is a port, not a bus. (Score:2)
Leverage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Leverage (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=le
Re:Leverage (Score:2)
Second, if you use the definition you linked, the posting doesn't make sense. Try it out.
Re:Leverage (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Leverage (Score:2)
Slashdotting is not a verb... (Score:2)
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
Re:Leverage (Score:2)
This is how languages evolve--take a social linguistics class. Or, at least leverage the knowledge contained in this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescriptive_linguist ics [wikipedia.org]
Sure they can (Score:2)
Re:Sure they can (Score:2)
Now instead of saying what the parent said, let's say that "It still gays though".
Re:Leverage (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Leverage (Score:2)
Trolling (Score:2)
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. Bi
Re:Leverage (Score:2)
not everybody speaks english at home
Neither do I, this doesn't mean I have to hide behind that fact. If you speak Dutch, that means you're either from Belgium, like me, or from the Netherlands. Both countries air movies and TV shows in their original (usually English) spoken language and use subtitles. So you should at least have it easier than say the French when it comes to learning the syntax/vocabulary. All that remains is the spelling, and you get that at school at what age? 14? Tops! Probably earl
If you're running a server... (Score:1)
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
Re:If you're running a server... (Score:2)
Wouldn't work. AGP can send a lot faster than PCI can receive, so your PCI reception speed is the bottleneck for that network. The PCI reception speed is equal to the PCI transmission speed. So it makes no sense to use anything that can send faster than PCI if the receiving end is also PCI.
However, if you need to stream a lot of different data to a couple of separate machines, you might be able to implement a multihead network card in AGP, and split the superior bandwidth over multiple physically separate
/dev/null (Score:5, Funny)
/dev/crypto (Score:2)
Video compressor (Score:2, Interesting)
That one is obvious (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Re:That one is obvious (Score:2)
This definitely calls for some shrubbery.
Re:This could never work (Score:2)
What is this 'sunlight' thing you speak of? None of my admin friends have a clue as to what you are talking about. Does it plug into AGP, or is it a PCI-X thing? Voltage requirements? Driver compatibility?
Don't leave us hanging there guy.
-Charlie
Headless, then... (Score:2, Interesting)
upstream vs. downstream (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:upstream vs. downstream (Score:2, Informative)
Re:upstream vs. downstream (Score:2)
All you need to do is keep the source material streaming into the graphics card's memory.
256MB would probably be more than sufficient for MPEG4 encoding too.
I think the main problem would be how to fit the the encoder into the old shader v1 GPU's we're talking about here.
PCI would in any case be more than enough (Score:2)
Re:upstream vs. downstream (Score:2)
A: so do it in chunks. My computer's only got half a gig of memory, but I've compressed whole DVDs using it... hey, how did I manage that?
B: There's the trou
TV Capture (Score:2)
AGP *IS* PCI, and then some... (Score:3, Informative)
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://
Re:AGP *IS* PCI, and then some... (Score:4, Informative)
It should be noted that the AGP bus in general has snooping turned off; the GART in the northbridge
handles all of the memory access therefore it can and should always tell when memory is being accessed
(therefore you can't rely on caching video memory like you would on a PCI card). Without snooping on
DMA transactions this speeds the bus up somewhat. It also lacks the interrupt routing lines. What this
basically means though, is that without a bridge chip, it ISN'T exactly the same as a PCI slot - if
you put more than one device on there, only the first will work, and even if you could, you'd
effectively trash memory every time you did PCI DMA.
As PCI ('frame mode') you're right, it's just a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot. In fact we make two board
designs at the place I work, one of which puts an AGP slot onto a 66MHz 32-bit PCI bus (and it works
fine up to the point of having a 3.3V keyed slot, and the industry moving on to 1.5 and 0.8V devices)
and one which has a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot which we ship an AGP riser for. Everything Just Works (tm).
AGP specs *also* has a USB connection routed to it but I dare say it's not been connected on most
motherboards since the dawn of AGP 2.0 (everyone seems to use I2C on the card and talk via some
kind of PCI configuration/register space logic instead).
There is plenty of stuff you can do with AGP but seriously who'd want to these days. You're picking
up old boards now, trying to do "cool" geeky things with them? What for? You're too cheap to move
to PCI Express?
Other uses for AGP slot. Some are practical. (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [hackaday.com] 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
Sad Concept (Score:2)
Re:AGP=Accelerated Graphics Port (Score:2)
It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment. Yeah, I know, fuck you slashdot.
Re:AGP=Accelerated Graphics Port (Score:2)
I remember IDE cards, but nothing else.
Re:Use for old AGP cards? (Score:2, Informative)
Not an adapter (Score:2)
Re:Ask Slashdot ... (Score:3, Interesting)