> > > > Both AMD and Intel are looking at I/O because it is and will be a limiting > > factor when scaling to higher core counts.
i/o starts sucking wind with one core. that's why we differentiate i/o from everything else we do. > And soon hard disk latencies are really going to start hurting (they > already are hurting some, I'm sure), and I'm not convinced of the > viability of SSDs. i'll assume you mean throughput. hard drive latency has been a big deal for a long time. tanenbaum integrated knowledge of track layout into his minix elevator algorithm. i think the gap between cpu performance and hd performance is narrowing, not getting wider. i don't have accurate measurements on how much real-world performance difference there is between a core i7 and an intel 5000. it's generally not spectacular, clock-for-clock. on the other hand, when the intel 5000-series was released, the rule of thumb for a sata hd was 50mb/s. it's not too hard to find regular sata hard drives that do 110mb/s today. the ssd drives we've (coraid) tested have been spectacular --- reading at > 200mb/s. if you want to talk latency, ssds can deliver 1/100th the latency of spinning media. there's no way that the core i7 is 100x faster than the intel 5000. - erik
