"Michael Brown" wrote
The switch-over from ISA to PCI, AT to ATX, PCI to AGP (for video cards)
all
took a couple of years at least. I've got a system that will go in an AT
or
ATX case, will accept PCI or ISA cards (and an AGP card), and another that
will take SDRAM or EDO. This is exactly what will happen with BTX. There
will be boards that will have both PCI and PCI-Express slots (and probably
an ATX slot too). Granted they might be (marginally) more expensive than
straight ATX or BTX boards, but they will exist because of the number of
"legacy" devices around. It would be commercial suicide for a company to
make a board (in 6 months time) that accepted no standard PCI cards and no
AGP cards. Case in point: the IBM PS2 with it's microchannel bus.

I'd say it'd be at least two years before you start to have to look hard
for
PCI or AGP supporting boards (assuming BTX doesn't die). And if BTX does
take off, you can be sure that there will be AMD-cpu chipsets that will
support it.


Hi,
great reply there! Yes *Historically* that's how its worked out so far, and
normally I would agree with what you said, but INTEL is *very* aware of AMD
now, and may be taking swift action to pull their whole platform up-to-date.

2004 looks like it will be a very significant year in PC platforms, I
thought the AMD side of things was getting messy, now it looks like INTEL
are going for it too!

At the end of the day I'm sure it will all be for the best, but for all us
*enthusiasts* who build machines for friends/clients etc. . . we got our
work cut out for us! what a learning curve, hehe and then we can get into
64-Bit computing :P
--
Wayne ][