Why AGP Enhances the Performance of Your Next Pentium® II Processor PC Design Arcade Level 3D Graphics Emerging software, including multiplayer 3D games, advanced CAD programs, Internet "malls", real estate tours and screen-to-screen applications, places serious bandwidth demands on the system. With its enhanced FPU performance, Dual Independent Bus (DIB) Architecture and MMX™ technology, the Pentium II processor makes an ideal 3D geometry engine. The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) provides a high-bandwidth pipeline between the graphics accelerator and system memory so that memory intensive 3D texture data can be stored and accessed from system memory. Together, the Pentium II processor and AGP provide the processing power and data flows necessary to improve the performance of these bandwidth-hungry applications. Balanced Platform Performance While moving graphics off the PCI bus enhances overall system performance, it does not by itself relieve the processor bus bottleneck inherent in Socket-7 architecture. The high-performance Dual Independent Bus (DIB) architecture of the Pentium II processor relieves the processor bus bottleneck by combining a dedicated high-speed L2 cache bus with an advanced pipelined system processor bus protocol capable of handling multiple simultaneous transactions. Combining AGP with DIB balances system performance even further by providing a high-bandwidth independent bus between the graphics accelerator and main memory. So while the floating point unit of the Pentium II processor generates geometry calculations out of its L2 cache, AGP allows the graphics accelerator to access main memory for texture data. This frees the Pentium II processor to do the job it was designed for‹including supporting richer content, providing better support for multiplayer games and realistic 3D sound to optimize the Visual Connected PC user experience. Moving graphics off the PCI bus to AGP also frees PCI bandwidth for other I/O applications, such as 100 Mb/s LAN and DVD. Scalability for Future AGP provides an added dimension of flexibility, allowing graphics accelerator software applications to take advantage of main memory for texture data storage. PC designers can also choose to place the graphics accelerator on the motherboard or on an add-in card. Moving forward, AGP gives PC designers a foundation for improved system performance. Ongoing increases in processor speed and L2 cache bus speed (which scales with processor speed in the DIB architecture), AGP bandwidth, system memory bandwidth, and new I/O (such as IEEE 1394), along with the emergence of AGP-optimized software applications will ensure that AGP remains the PC graphics solution of choice for years to come.