Originally posted by: Golgatha
Originally posted by: Peter
There are many benefits in PCIE ... it's electrically much more robust than AGP, there are no technical constraints on slot count since it's all point-to-point not a bus, board layout is easier, the PCIE-16 slot provides more power to the graphics card than AGP did, lesser PCIE slot types use much less real estate than PCI slots did, and probably tons more.
I think most of the draw was to move away from PCI more than AGP (which is a similar spec to PCI I believe) for the added
dedicated bandwidth the PCIe slots provide. It gives motherboard makers a way to simplify their designs and make designs for the server and workstation market more similar, thus reducing costs.
The laptop market, too.
PCIe is faster, but not dramatically faster, in 'downstream' (ie, PC->graphics card) bandwidth. However, PCIe has WAY more 'upstream' (graphics card->PC) bandwidth. This is pretty irrelevant right now, but could become important for things like doing video encoding on your GPU, or when "AIW"-type cards start coming with HDTV tuners built in.
Beyond that, it's basically all the stuff mentioned above: It's cheaper/easier to manufacture on MB and graphics card side, since it doesn't need nearly as many traces, it provides more power, it's MUCH easier to have multiple high-speed PCIe devices, it's not a shared bus like PCI or AGP, and -- at some point, in theory -- every expansion device in the entire system can use one kind of slot/interface (just about anything short of a GPU or RAID controller can use a PCIex1 interface just fine). That would be a really nice thing to have from a system integrator's perspective.
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