Here's Howard's response to the question about using a northbridge chip:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: howard parkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jun 26, 2006 11:54 AM Subject: Re: [Open-graphics] The Emperor Has No Clothes (and some suggestions) To: Timothy Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Its not that its not possible, its just not an attractive solution. When I first looked at doing this, all the Intel Northbridges used AGP. The AGP interfaces in these chipsets could communicate with memory, but not with the integrated graphics engine. To get the Northbridge to work as a GPU, you would have to have a processor connected to the the processor bus and DMA commands into memory, then transfer them to the Graphics engine. Its feasible but :- 1) All graphics engine access has to go through memory. 2) Intel integrated graphics engines suck a bit. 3) You need a processor hooked up to the front side bus, so there are cost/power/size issues. With the 945G northbridge, the PCIe interface and integrated video are mutually exclusive, so its not possible to use this chip as a GPU. Howard _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
