P
Patrick Geoffray
Robert said:I dunno. I know even less about expansion bus protocols than I do about
most other things. Is there anything you can do with any available
out-of-the box interconnect that you can't do with lower latency using
PCI-Express? Limited bandwidth and distance, to be sure, but how could
you beat the latency?
Most of the end-to-end latency these days comes from the PCI and the
link (SerDes + distance). So PCI-Express-only would not save much. As
Del noted, Intel is working on a switching extensions to PCI-Express,
but the PCI-Express protocol is not really designed for that: flow
control is very tight, as you would expect on a very short
point-to-point connection. If PCI-Express wants to go outside the box,
it will have to deal with some tough problems with flow control.
Patrick