Editing Accelerated Graphics Port (section)

===Side-band AGP requests using SBA[7:0]===
If side-band addressing is supported and configured, the PIPE# signal is not used. (And the signal is re-used for another purpose in the AGP 3.0 protocol, which requires side-band addressing.) Instead, requests are broken into 16-bit pieces which are sent as two bytes across the SBA bus. There is no need for the card to ask permission from the motherboard; a new request may be sent at any time as long as the number of outstanding requests is within the configured maximum queue depth. The possible values are:

; <code>0aaa aaaa aaaa alll</code>
: Queue a request with the given low-order address bits A[14:3] and length 8×(L[2:0]+1). The command and high-order bits are as previously specified. Any number of requests may be queued by sending only this pattern, as long as the command and higher address bits remain the same.
; <code>10cc ccra aaaa aaaa</code>
: Use command C[3:0] and address bits A[23:15] for future requests. (Bit R is reserved.) This does not queue a request, but sets values that will be used in all future queued requests.
; <code>110r aaaa aaaa aaaa</code>
: Use address bits A[35:24] for future requests.
; <code>1110 aaaa aaaa aaaa</code>
: Use address bits A[47:36] for future requests.
; <code>1111 0xxx</code>, <code>1111 10xx</code>, <code>1111 110x</code>
: ''Reserved, do not use.''
; <code>1111 1110</code>
: Synchronization pattern used when starting the SBA bus after an idle period.{{r|agp10|agp20|p1=68|p2=163}}
; <code>1111 1111</code>
: [[No operation]]; no request. At AGP 1× speed, this may be sent as a single byte and a following 16-bit side-band request started one cycle later. At AGP 2× and higher speeds, all side-band requests, including this NOP, are 16 bits long.

Sideband address bytes are sent at the same rate as data transfers, up to 8× the 66&nbsp;MHz basic bus clock. Sideband addressing has the advantage that it mostly eliminates the need for turnaround cycles on the AD bus between transfers, in the usual case when read operations greatly outnumber writes.