Enzyme, re: LDT article,
Thanks for the article. Assuming Charles Mitchell of AMD has his facts altogether, there are a lot of things I did not know about LDT:
<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>
Very interesting. I did not know AMD was this ambitious with LDT. And I thought it was just going to be a scalable interconnect for high-end servers, which in itself is a very compelling technology.
<Dean Klein, vice president of the integrated products group at Micron Technology Inc., Boise, Idaho, praised the new bus, even deeming it a potential replacement for PCI.>
Whatever happened to PCI-X? Infiniband? Both are already open standards, very mature in their development, and have the top OEMs supporting it, including Compaq, HP, IBM, Dell, etc. I have my doubts regarding this "potential replacement for PCI," since it's already a little late in the game.
Then again, LDT was mentioned as a technology that is being considered for PCI-X bridge chips, among other applications. At least that use makes sense.
<To date, AMD said 40 hardware companies have signed on as LDT partners.>
Would those partners include Compaq, HP, or IBM? Maybe Transmeta? I'm curious. Unfortunately, AMD isn't saying.
<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.>
"Coherent LDT." Guess this is the new name of the scalable interconnect I was referring to earlier.
<the forthcoming Sledgehammer 64-bit microprocessor will contain an integrated north bridge with an LDT connection>
Neat. EV6 will be replaced with LDT, an interconnect w/ much better bandwidth per pin. I wonder if Sledgehammer will also include an integrated memory controller. That should be one serious design of a processor.
Sounds like grand plans for LDT, much grander than I originally thought (or AMD ever revealed in their previous announcements regarding LDT). Man, I wish I could see some of these new LDT design wins, including desktop and server chipsets.
Tenchusatsu |
