I'm thinking about how to put all these bits of the x86 system together into northbridges and southbridges and all that, and it occurs to me that it would be nice to have a generic "link" memory object that just connect two ports together with some bandwidth and latency. I think we talked about that with connecting caches directly together, but I was thinking more like if you wanted to support hypertransport and have northbridges connected in a point to point network. What I'm envisioning is the northbridge would have a port for the CPU, and then a port for everything else. You'd connect links or busses or whatever you want to the northbridge at that port to get PCIe busses and hypertransport links. This actually sounds a lot like routers in a mesh network. I think in x86 the northbridge isn't much more than a GART/IOMMU, a router for hypertransport, a memory controller, and a PCIe bus controller. Most of that could just be a router with a little bit more brains than usual for the GART/IOMMU. Any thoughts?

Gabe
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