For video cards, PCI slot offers simply not enough speed and features to be competitive to the AGP slot. This will now change the “Arapahoe work group”, and has submitted a draft of the successor to PCI-SIG.

PCI-SIG “manages” the PCI bus for ten years, i.e. Since 1992. The Arapahoe work group consists of large companies such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, Dell and IBM. The first specifications of the 3GIO (third generation I/o) were now submitted to the above PCI-SGI. If the PCI SIG leadership approves the draft, all 740 member companies get 60 days to determine the specifications. The final name of the new slot is to say “PCI Express”. The first versions should have up to 200 MBytes per second of bandwidth. This is already a considerable increase over the current 133 MB / s. Later up to 1.25 Gbytes per second to can be achieved. The look is also change compared to the current PCI bus. So, the PIN number will be reduced from 84 to 40. Thus the “small” slot in smaller devices to can be fitted. The first PCI Express 1.0 standard should be ready in the second quarter of this year. End of 2003 then first workstations with the new slot to be manufactured. Also the large graphics chip manufacturers ATI and nVidia is interested for PCI Express.