Ken, "embedded systems" usually refers to something totally different than the 300m PC base (of which a year ago everyone said was 50% Win3x, don't know about now though). It's like what runs your microwave or VCR, more sophisticated stuff too. Surprisingly, 68k successors rule this world this days, I think. Margins too thin for Intel to bother with.
Them 300m PC's they's "legacy systems", except for those running that morbidly obese middleware OS, NT.
About that MMX Channel thing, this sounds like AGP, not? At any rate, regular DMA, as in PCI Busmastering, doesn't involve the CPU at all, so I don't know what MMX can do to improve on that for disk. Video, there's a battle there, it's not clear what problem MMX is solving.
One more quick point: My understanding of why disks don't read more than 1 head at a time is because they can only sense one track at a time, the alignment from arm to arm and platter to platter is not exact enough to have 2 platters being read simultaneously. Settle time and all that, there's a feedback loop in there. You could put in 2 entire arm assemblies, I think that's been done but it's probably not cost effective.
Cheers, Dan. |
