However, the Thunderbird doesn t really have much of an advantage over the Coppermine, even though it is technically a more powerful processor. It may be that AMD decided that it would be cheaper and easier to use a 64bit-wide level 2, because it gave the required performance levels. A special compiler is available from Intel which can optimize code to use SIMD extensions, something which AMD isn t able to offer. Because it s a lot more well-known and publicized than other computing industry clashes. Even though we re talking about the video card market rather than the processing industry, the political forces at play are exactly the same.
Marketing is still king.
If we look beyond all of the marketing hype we can start to make some predictions on the video cards of tomorrow. Expect the AGP slot to be around for a long time to come, as the video card will always have its own dedicated connector. 4X AGP does not currently give anyone much of a reason to upgrade from 2X, but in the near feature this will become an increasingly hard-pushed limit. It would be stupid to think that 4X will be enough to last for long, so we can safely say that AGP speed will increase. The AGP Pro slot will also become the thing to have, as this variation of the slot gives provides an extra power input, which future cards will definitely need.