Ten, re:<After all, when you have a FSB that consumes 1.06 GB/sec of a 1.6 GB/sec RDRAM channel, you've only got 0.54 GB/sec left for everything else (AGP-4x, PCI66, UDMA, ...)>
540 MB/sec is a heck of a bandwidth, and actually, balances the 1.06G/sec of the CPU channel quite well.
First, its very rare that 1.06G/sec is used by a CPU running at 733 MHz.
Second AGP is used to transfer textures from main memory to the graphics board. Nobody uses textures larger than a couple megabytes. If we had a hundred of these a second, we'd only use up 200 MB/sec.
Third, no hard disk transfers faster than 20MB/sec sustained, maybe 40 MB/sec peak. Even a RAID array would be less than 100 MB/sec.
Fourth, it would be very unlikely for all of these activities (peak CPU<->memory bandwidth, peak HD transfer, peak texture transfer) to ever occur at the same time, but if they did, we still only used up 2/3 of our spare I/O capacity.
The i840 I/O bandwidth makes sense ONLY for an SMP system.
Petz |
