amd dual core preview

[cadaveca]

cadaveca, what do you mean with if they need a crossbar to use the hyper transport bus? all the communication from the cpus is hooked up to the crossbar, and the corssbar is hooked up to the cpus. afaik the two cpus can even access each others cache through the crossbar, but im not sure about that.

I am saying that in order to bring dual cores to market in a viable way(meaning in a way they can make money), the actual make-up of the processor from the crossbar to the chipset(crossbar, mem controller, hypertransport) has to remain the same.
You were asking about how they we going to connect the cpu's together...to me, the crossbar is how it will stay, until they change the socket(and probably long after that as well). Changing the socket right at this moment, when new chipsets have come out, does not make good business sense. Also, knowing that multicores were part of AMD's plan from the start, it kinda just makes sense. Everyone has been heralding the death of 754 for a while, but i have been one of few people advocating it's rise from the supposed "bargain bin", back to mainstream right alongside 939(becasue of hypertransport, the crossbar, the memory controller, and what it meant for thier future plans).


thier use of the crossbar allows them to change the actual functions of the cpu itself, but provides a framework with which future processors can use to connect to the mainboard as well, and just might bring about some standardization that will lead to lower costs in development and less compatibility issues. To me, this is the whole purpose of the HyperTransprot Consortium. Standardization of connectivity in the computing platform. But hey, i just predict the trends, and not the technicalities.


EMC2 says they could have used an arbiter, and really, i don't even know what that is, but i do remember reading AMD saying something about it not being able to conform to the uses they intended for the A64, and something about latency, but with how i had HT confused in the beginning, maybe i'm off my rocker a bit.