BACK IN JUNE we reported that ATI was taking the bridging direction with its graphics, and now we have some further proof. ATI hit Nvidia very hard for its AGP to PCIe bridge cards but now has decided to button its lip about it. It learned that Nvidia made things right as it is already shipping its bridge chip-based cards and passing SIG tests. With this bridge chip you can make PCIe and AGP cards from similar silicon.
You can definitely save some money if you tape out one chip instead of two. If you, for example, made X700 as a native PCIe card you just a need small and relatively cheap bridge chip to turn it into an AGP card. ATI"s CEO told us that it will do it, but now we"ve also heard similar whisperings from several outside people. We expect an ATI chip to be bidirectional to be able to bridge a native PCIe card to AGP and vice versa, but we don"t have confirmation yet for our speculation.