Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

HailMary, so you are saying that a future Intel North Bridge will have PCI-Express built directly in.

Yeap that is what I am saying. Just like AGP ports exist on northbridges today.

I think AMD actually has the overall advantage as the CPU benefits the most from low latency memory access. Video cards are mostly going to use main memory as an off-card texture storage area, which get loaded into the local video card memory in bursts. Latency is not important for that. Raw bandwidth is.

Now if for some reason video card makers decide they no longer need as much local memory on the card, as they have a fast PCI Express route to memory, then it may become more of an issue having extra latency. I still don't see this happening, as they will pay a latency penalty just by having to hop through PCI Express and across the north bridge instead of using a local memory controller. The local memory controller on the video card will still have an advantage, even with PCI Express, so I think we'll continue to see this trend of video cards having local memory.