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First AGP chipset to ship next week
Intel will next Monday kick off a new age in PC graphics when it releases the first chipset to support its Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) architecture.
The release of the 440LX PCIset, to give it its full name, will mean that Pentium II system makers will be able to make graphics fly at approximately twice the performance of cards that are connected to the PCI bus. AGP-capable cards are already available from a host of graphics card makers.
The LX also supports the new ACPI power management standard, SDRAM, UltraDMA/33 and Concurrent PCI.
Intel won't be alone in greeting the LX with new motherboards. Taiwan's Asus will also ship a line of boards including dual-CPU and integral UltraSCSI flavours.
Not to be outdone, AMD's chipset partner VIA plans to port AGP to Socket 7, allowing its K6 and other Socket 7 processors to support the standard.