TABLE OF CONTENTS An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
This chapter looks more closely at the timeline for products based on PCI Express to enter the market. Several factors play a role in the introduction of applications. This chapter looks at the factors that affect adoption and discusses the profiles, benefits, challenges, and tools for early adopters as well as late adopters of the technology.
The applications that can take advantage of the benefits of PCI Express will be the first to enter the market. Graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 1394, high-speed chip interconnects, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet are a few examples of the types of applications to adopt PCI Express.
One of the initial applications expected to make use of PCI Express is PC graphics. The steady demand for increased graphics capability makes PC graphics applications the first opportunity for widespread adoption of PCI Express. Products based on the PCI Express architecture are expected to become available in late 2003. From 1985 to 2002, graphics capabilities evolved from text-only displays to advanced 3D complex images. During the same time period, the graphics interconnect evolved from the 16 megabytes per second bandwidth of the ISA bus to more than 2,000 megabytes per second bandwidth of the AGP8X bus. The PC graphics market has a proven evolution to higher capabilities and PCI Express-based graphics will be among the first applications to take full advantage of the PCI Express...
