[rescue] Advice on Octanes

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Kurt Huhn wrote:

> That I knew, but I thought you were saying that the entire architecture
> was starting to support switching.

Some of the  Nforce and Intel chipsets do full crossbar approaches
allowing for relatively nifty non blocking requests from multiple CPUs to
multiple PCI buses and whatnot.

  I was becoming confused, because I'm
> sure the various PC makers would have started blasting this from every
> rooftop - and I've heard nothing.

Well switching is not a cool marketroid word so that may be part of the
reason why they have not started pumping it out in their ads.

The problem is that with the advent of the G5 and the new Opterons which
are built around hypertransport and crossbars, the traditional workstation
makers are going to have a hard time getting better bandwidth than those
"commodity" systems.

I believe PCI Xpress is going to be a point to point switch system, so now
you can have XIO-like boards at mass pricess with globs of bw.

> Actually I have no AGP around here.  I did, but it didn't do me any
> good, so I traded that PC for an O2.  Then I bought a Playstation2.  I'm
> much happier now.

Well, for me it is the opposite, I have an SGI as a desptop and a PC as a
number cruncher. Interesting times we live indeed....

Now if the economy would not suck as much as it did and if funding was
actually real :) i'd be getting a proper G5 sitting on my desk. But it
seems that Dells will be what we will be getting for the foreseable
future.