"The outside world" <> memory. Perhaps now you see why I think you're
purposely misleading. Certainly you *know* this. Hypertransport is an
I/O interface primarily, though is used for memory in a UMA sort of system.
It's a very different proposition from putting memory requests on a
front-side bus and letting a memory controller deal with it. The
traffic that would normally go onto a shared Intel front-side bus is
split between traffic for local memory and hypertransport. If I were
more accustomed to NUMA systems, I might have referred to it as an
interconnect, but it is carrying memory traffic, and the on-chip
management of that traffic cannot be trivial. And it is interfacing
to memory through that link. The fact that, with good locality, most
of the traffic might be going through the link to local memory changes
very little. You still have to interface to memory through
hypertransport and you have to manage the traffic on-die. Maybe
that's all easy. It certainly didn't sound easy to me at the time.
I don't think that's true. Few really did "know" this, until it was
over. *VERY* few saw that particular speed bump. After 130nm (a fairly
simple transistion), everyone was cruising. Oops!
Stretched silicon sounded perfectly straightforward to you?
Your posts speak for themselves. You seem to be distrought that Opteron
brought Itanic to it's grave. ...when it was really Intel's senior
management that blew it (on both ends).
I have neither understood nor paid much attention to Intel's plans for
Itanium on the desktop, other than that I knew that Intel planned to
replace x86 completely with Itanium at some point. The space that I
am interested in is impacted by Opteron in a completely different way,
and I'm still not sure I understand what the impact is. As to my
being "distraught," I do occasionally allow myself to be upset by
things I have no control over, but this isn't one of them.
You, nor I, know what money has traded places. I note that you don't
comment on the AMD bodies placed in IBM-EF as a joint venture. Tehy
aren't exactly free either.
I'm just not going to go look for the news releases or the posts
(here). I think the actual figure was smaller, but I just can't be
bothered. IBM and AMD worked out a joint venture that was to their
mutual benefit. The terms of the deal were announced. I don't know
why you want to argue about it, and I don't understand why you think I
read something dark into it. I don't.
Your flip-flop on the technology "problem". First you say it's a
"leakage" problem, then say that P-M is better because it performs better
at lower frequency. Which is it?
If you consume less power for equivalent performance, the part of the
enegy budget that goes into leakage is not so much of a problem, and
there is less leakage to begin with if you can operate at lower
voltage.
Then that's an even dumber response that I'd have expected. Certainly
someone has to sell boxes, but what I said *is* still true. There is no
invention in Dell. It is no more than Intel's box-making plant. It's
interesting that they couldn't even make a profit on white ones, since
that's all they do.
How Intel sells its processors does matter, and Dell, just like
everyone else, ultimately has to sell performance, especially into the
server space. If Intel caved on 64-bits for x86, it's because the
people who sell boxes for them said they needed it. You're the one
who claims Intel is marketing-driven. Who's flip-flopping now?
RM
.