ATI is not planning to let AGP die out so soon and it seems that plans for AGP versions of both the X600 and X300 boards are well under way. It would be foolish to make those cards PCI-E only as it is not expected that the migration will be so quick.
ATI also needs to keep all customers busy and by issuing a new AGP chip the Canadians hope they will tempt people who are not planning to overhaul their systems quite yet.
The process of transforming a native PCI-E board to an AGP one is straight-forward enough, if a little bizarre but the needs of marketing have, by now, become dogma for all self-respecting graphics manufacturers. So if nVidia is not planning to do away with AGP versions of its boards, courtesy of the HSI bridge, ATI will definitely keep up and offer similar versions of its cards for at least the next year.
In any case the existence of two versions of each of the graphics gladiator's boards, will allow for interesting and most probably funny, comparisons of ATI and nVidia products in many hardware review sites.
