Nehalem Info from hkepc

[Shintai]

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.


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.


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?


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?

I think you missed the point. Also are you telling me 386SL and 486SL wasnt mass produced?

HT/IMC or CSI/IMC is NOT flexible compared to the FSB solution. And the result is 939->AM2 and soon AM3 with complete memory change. AMD have been using Intel to push new memory types. Here is the catch, with Intel also having a IMC on each and every CPU. Who will make the jump? We will sit idle for along time due to the egg and the chicken issue. Who will make a new IMC on a CPU with a new socket without cheap memory? Who will make the cheap memory before the CPU on the new socket?

Ofcourse we will use x86/x64 20 years from now unless there is a radical change. PPC is newer than x86, but still just as flawed in design. The main problem and what will always dominate in a competitive IT industry is backwards compability. Everyone is so scared to make something new, because without compaiblity you go nowhere. Same reason our BIOSes still uses 16bit realmode, even tho we are in 2008 with 64bit and multicore CPUs. or that we today convert between CISC and RISC on CPUs.

And its perhaps even worse on the software side. Compability is whats holding us back everywhere.

Looking on IA64 and types like it. There is a large benefit in both size and power requirements due to the compiler based scheduling. Also its ability to scale with performance up to 11 issue wide (and maybe beyond) compared with your x86/x64 3/4 issue wide.

Now I am not saying IA64 is the golden grail. But I know for sure its not PPC/x86/x64. We simply just need to move on.