Nehalem Info from hkepc

[mesyn191]

And AMD was catching up to Intel 20 years ago with IMC? 386SL anyone?

There were plenty of chips before that too that used a IMC as well you know, its a old idea, AMD was just the 1st company to make a financially successful mass produced x86 chip with a IMC.

Unlike HT, CSI is actually designed right from the start. HT was not done well from the beginning and was overhelming bad for specially 8 socket setups.

Thats not a design flaw... the 8 socket Opteron systems were always for niche applications that had low bandwidth requirements and high CPU requirements. 4 socket Opteron systems were always supposed to be the "sweet" spot.

And I am not sure how good HT have been for the consumer market. It simply lacked the flexibility of the FSB type connected MCH.

Huh?! HT was/is about as flexible and open as you could get in the x86 CPU world. There were even 3rd party FPGA's/devices made by other companies for it!! What else could Intel's FSB connect to besides the MCH?

This is also one of my fears now for the future. I have a feeling we will be with DDR3 for a long long long time now.

Nah, still plenty of things they can do, just look at what Rambus has done with XDR.

Re: your ISA comments...

I expect we'll still be using x86/x86-64 chips 20 years from now, with various extensions to accommodate parallelization of course. Its not a very good ISA, but it gets the job done, and backwards compatibility is too valuable to get rid of. As for IA64 I don't think it'll ever enter a consumer grade chip, its strictly a "Big Iron" ISA that only has worthwhile advantages over x86 in FP code but is much more labor intensive to develop for. Strange that you dislike PPC even though its a better ISA than x86, what does it do wrong exactly?