Fyo,
I think MSFT's approach had a lot to do with time to market. Both on software and hardware side.
On X-box 2, MSFT has a lot more time to put a long term strategy in place. The real fear (or opportunity) for AMD is if AMD moves to an what Inquirer reported, which is if they design their own CPU, and if the instruction set is the Intermediate Language (IL) they use in their .Net strategy. (I have it on my to-do list to buy MSFTS IL assembly programming book).
As far as HT based solution, I think we discussed it here, and IMO, it makes more sense to have a memory controller on the CPU, which needs the low latency, with a fat HT link to graphics core which needs the bandwidth, and not the latency.
I would not be surprised though if by the time X-Box 2 is released, nVidia (or someone else) can put enough DRAM on graphics chip die, to make the bandwidth virtually unlimited for small part of graphics memory, critical to performance, and have a smaller portion delivered from larger memory pool connected to the CPU.
Joe |
