Mike, thanks for setting the record straight on the fact that Core
2 / EM64T chips from Intel aren't bastard sons of 64-bit computing
(well, any more so than x86_64 is...)
On Dec 20, 2006, at 12:53 PM, Mike Marion wrote:
The one huge advantage that AMD does still have is Hypertransport.
Intel has pig-headedly refused to license it, and AMD gets a huge
advantage in memory access due to their use of it. Intel still
uses the older North/southbridge setup and has contention between
processes accessing memory.
I don't get this, either. Intel seems to stupidly hold on to the bus
design for all CPU communications, whereas AMD's HyperTransport is so
much more flexible and allows non-shared communications paths between
components.
HyperTransport really becomes obviously better in I/O-bound, multiple-
CPU operations (highly-parallelized data-intensive computing). Sure,
Intel's cranked the hell out of the bus speed, and I'm sure there are
very fancy interleaving algorithms so that multiple CPUs can use the
bus at the same time, but overall throughput from multiple CPUs to/
from memory or storage faces more congestion on the bus architecture
than on HyperTransport's (effectively) point-to-point architecture.
I keep thinking to myself, how long until core system architecture
interconnects become more complicated than high-end ethernet routing
switches? Or are we already at that point?
Gregory
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