Chip speed increases and the growing system complexity are behind the change, said the market researcher. As a result all three combined will experience an average compound annual growth rate of 173 per cent from 2003 to 2008.
According to Mark Kirstein, In-Stat/MDR’s general manager: “Despite a few early missteps, few would doubt that the proliferation of PCI Express will be rapid and complete, at least in the PC arena. Its ability to reach beyond desktops, notebooks and servers remains to be seen.”
HyperTransport may already be established in the PC market, game console and network switches markets, but even with this head start it is expected to lose out in the long term to PCI Express.
The big loser in the imminent proliferation of PCI Express is not HyperTransport or RapidIO, but PCI-X, a server-centric extension of the PCI bus to bring more raw bandwidth to the I/O peripherals that needed it in the server market. PCI-X is expected to disappear, altogether, by the end of 2008.
While PCI and PCI Express will coexist for a transition period, there is no way to support both PCIe and AGP graphics. Thus, graphics will do a hard shift from AGP to PCIe in a given system, and the transition from AGP to PCI Express should be quite rapid.
In contrast, the market for RapidIO has taken more time to germinate, but In-Stat/MDR sees some embedded markets in which RapidIO will find a warm welcome, most notably in 3G mobile basestations.
The In-Stat/MDR report, “Emerging Chip-to-Chip Interfaces: Making Connections in Next-Generation Systems” is priced at $2,495.
