[geeks] Carly's Gone!!!

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 @ 17:11 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> There Yet.  There's an awful lot of potential in IA64, due in no small
> part to it not being held back by the three decades of hacks in IA32 the
> way AMD64 is.

Not quite related, but I read a paper that said that AMD basically has
created their own very powerful CPU, and the Intel ISA is actually a
hardware emulation on top of that.

It seems to me that AMD could release their own CPU by removing that
layer without a tremendous engineering effort.

> >Then think of the things that where invented on / for Alpha and that are
> >now soled by intel (HyperThreading) and AMD (HyperTransport).
> 
> I really wish Alpha would be revived.  I'm no big fan of most of the
> systems architecture of the Alpha systems, but the processor itself and
> the interconnect stuff they came up with (HyperTransport being one of
> them) is amazing.

Is this the same HyperTransport that VIA and AMD are using on the AMD64
motherboards?

For example, my motherboard has one HyperTransport link between CPU and
the northbridge, 16-bits at N GHz (can't remember right this moment), so
it can move quite a bit of data.

I read a spec sheet and it said that HyperTransport can be 8-16 bits
wide, and listed several operating speeds, with more coming in the
future.

Also in the future:

    - links for more than just CPU and northbridge
    - a cross-bar like system to connect components with HT
    - other goodies I can't remember

If this actually pans out, maybe the PC will finally get some rational
I/O on the motherboard.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The determined programmer can write a
FORTRAN program in any language." ]