SAM and other new hardware - missing modern graphics card slots?

[Zac67]

In case you haven't noticed: AGP is dead and PCI-X is rapidly losing life as well (don't think there ever was a single PCI-X gfx card).

PCIe is the way forward with the industry currently moving from PCIe 1.x to 2.0.

[Zac67]

I was trying to point out that AGP wouldn't put you in a much better position than PCI (except for the 2nd hand market).

OTOH, a AGP to PCI adapter can be fairly simple if the firmware/chipset support such and either use single slot PCI or two (bridged) busses - but that would lower flexibility or raise costs.

PCIe is a technology that is not easily implemented in CPLD and would require substantial additional logic/codecs, so in small volume markets it's no choice, unfortunately.

Additionally, another major problem of a niche market is the availability of drivers, so supporting current hardware is not realistic anyway. When looking at price / performance trade-offs, PCI is a rather reasonable choice as long as there's any hardware available.

[Zac67]

For stuff like soundcards and network cards PCI still is the norm.

Well, the market for soundcards and NICs has grown comparatively small with virtually every sold mainboard sporting onboard components. It'll probably shift from PCI to PCIe within the next two years.

[Zac67]

AGP was something like a crutch for eliminating the then PCI bottleneck. PCI, AGP and PCIe look extremely similar from the software side, but electrically they differ largely (PCI/AGP) to completely (PCI/PCIe).
Unlike PCI, AGP is not a bus but a point-to-point interface, so it's impossible to build a simple adapter without bridge logic.

PCIe is also point-to-point, so it allows substantial upgrading of the slots (or rather ports) while still allowing full downward compatibility for older cards - this has always been a problem with PCI and obstructed faster development. PCIe is developing much faster than PCI and probably will be around even longer than its predecessor.