Lighting Data Transfer
Comments on the following post from Artie on the FOOL?
AMD is touting a technology, Lightning Data Transfer, that Transmeta seems to be very interested in.
I don't know much about it, but I noticed several knowledgeable longs on Yahoo have commented that is perhaps why AMD was hiring Rambus savy engineers.
I was speculating it would be really nice if Lightning Data Transfer is promising, and uses a few Rambus patents in places. Hopefully, (unlike DDR)this would be unambiguous and straight forward.
Here's an article I found:
AMD has major plans for its LDT bus
Apr. 29, 2000 (Electronic Buyers News - CMP via COMTEX) -- Silicon Valley-Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is quietly taking the next steps in its journey from component supplier to technology provider by trying to broadly license its proprietary Lightning Data Transfer (LDT) bus technology.
AMD is trying to establish LDT as a universal interconnect, a single bus for what Mitchell calls "the bus hodge-podge" of PCI, Accelerated Graphics Port, DRAM, and other dedicated high-bandwidth buses inside a computer. According to Mitchell, LDT design work is taking place in PC chipsets and multiprocessor chipsets, but the bus is also being considered as an integrated I/O link within embedded RISC microprocessors, embedded RISC chipsets, PCI-X bridge chips, and OEM routers and switches.
...
The LDT technology was originally designed to provide high-bandwidth connections between the north bridge of a chipset and other bridge chips, whether it was the south bridge or some specific I/O bridge, such as a dedicated Infiniband host controller. The bridges could also be daisy-chained across a single LDT link.
...
But AMD sees the technology as being extended "up" into a point-to-point connection for servers, eliminating the microprocessor bus entirely. For 32-bit Athlon multiprocessor systems, Mitchell disclosed that a superset of the LDT specification, or "coherent LDT," has been developed for non-uniform memory-access matrixes, where arrays of processors can access dedicated local memory as well as "distant" memory that is attached to other CPUs.
Mitchell also said that the forthcoming Sledgehammer 64-bit microprocessor will contain an integrated north bridge with an LDT connection...
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