45nm 6MB L3 Shanghai on HT3 links will be Nehalem's main competitor not Barcelona.
Both are future to-be-released products, but I believe the risk of a lithographic process change (in the former) is much greater than the risk of an architectural change (in the latter).
At the very physical (device) level, there are one, maybe two ways to solve a problem. Think about how few physical processes one can use to build a hard drive (using the GMR effect en.wikipedia.org ) or to build a transistor (FET or BJT). In fact, the solutions are so rare yet important that, for example, the inventors/discoverers of the GMR and the transistor were awarded Nobel Prizes.
On the other hand, a high-level architectural or algorithm problem has _many_ solutions. One example is encoding/decoding in communication protocols, where one can communicate by changing the frequency (FM, PSK, etc.), or by changing the amplitude (ASK, M-ary ASK, etc.) Sorting algorithms are another example -- there exist good sorting algorithms such as quick sort, heap sort, etc.
HT3 is a great link, but a company like Intel can come up with another one (CSI) that is just as great. |
