NVIDIA

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

's BR02 ″High Speed Interconnect″ (often abbreviated to 'HSI') chip was used in their early PCI Express

PCI Express

PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...

 graphics cards, where it acted as a bridge between the PCI Express connection to the computer and the natively AGP

Accelerated Graphics Port

The Accelerated Graphics Port is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a video card to a computer's motherboard, primarily to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics. Since 2004 AGP has been progressively phased out in favor of PCI Express...

 GPU

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

. This allowed NVIDIA to release a PCI Express graphics card without redesigning the graphics card's GPU for the new interface.

NVIDIA has also developed an HSI chip which works in the opposite direction - allowing natively PCI Express graphics card to be released for the AGP interface.