Timothy Miller wrote:
On 6/20/06, Dieter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My crystal ball says AGP will go away very soon.
My crystal ball says PCI will go away, but slower than AGP. The
problem will be too few slots per board. (Even worse than now.)
My crystal ball says PCIe will be good for several years.
That's why we chose PCI-X. That's because PCI will be around a while,
and we can slap a PCIX-PCIe bridge chip on a board and get PCIe.
That is what nVidia is currently doing, and it can have performance issues.
<SNIP>
> Can we get the performance we need with 65 nm or do we need
> to go smaller?
If the design were ready today, could we even get 65 nm? Isn't AMD
still using 90 nm?
I don't think it's necessary. 65nm, compared to 90, buys you mostly
power consumption and yield. Performance doesn't go up that much.
Keep in mind that it's wire delays, not transistor switching time,
that dominates chip performance.
65 nm gives you shorter wires. Are they faster?
<SNIP>
What versions of Unix block I/O to do other things? It is normally
I/O that gets preference.
I'm not sure what's being discussed here. Usually, you try to overlap
CPU and I/O by using DMA. But the process waiting on the I/O is
blocked. And sometimes, you can't do the I/O via DMA.
The issue that I have is when either keyboard or mouse input is blocked
by other processes. A secondary issue is when a redraw has to wait for
another process. Some of the time, I presume that it has to wait for a
swap which can't be fixed except with more main memory.
There are also issues with the X server using enough CPU that process
schedulers will drop it in priority.
You mention "distros", so is this something specific to linux?
> I think that what you need to address this without rewriting parts of
> the Linux Kernel is to have a CPU dedicated to running X.
If so, someone needs to rewrite the Linux Kernel.
With a graphics card that uses DMA, you offload the I/O overhead from
the CPU to the GPU, so the CPU can do other things. This has the
effect of lowering the load for the X server, so it gets a higher
process priority.
With a graphics card that runs the X server, you would offload even more
overhead. :-D
--
JRT
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