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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (66762)	7/27/1999 8:57:00 PM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583371

Tench - RE: " I disagree, however, since by the time HotRail is released, the situation in the marketplace may have changed somewhat." Meaning Intel may already have a successor to Profusion out soon? Thanks for the info we wouldn't have gotten anywhere else. I only understood what you wrote when you wrote about the disadvantages. I wonder if that means anything. ;)

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (66762)	7/27/1999 10:43:00 PM
From: fyo	Respond to of 1583371

Tench - Re: Imagine a central switch chip which acts kind of like a big "Grand Central Station" for all communication between processors, memory, and I/O devices. This switch chip supports a number of ports, called HotRail Channel (HRC) interfaces. Each interface consists on two 10-bit uni-directional ports, each capable of sustaining 1.6 GB/sec of bandwidth. Adding up both directions gives us a total of 3.2 GB/sec bandwidth per HRC. On the other side of each interface is a bridge chip, which connects each HRC to some other interface, either a processor bus, or memory, or I/O. The architecture is designed to be flexible, so some ports can be connected to processors, some to memory, and some to I/O (PCI-X, NGIO, Future I/O, whatever), depending on the needs of the server. Without knowing the technical details, this sounds pretty similar to the SGI Octane 'crossbar' system (although it resides on the other side of the memory/CPU bus). I don't know how familiar you are with SGI's technology, but it seems to be pretty solid. Thanks for summarizing the article (unfortunately, I don't have access to MDR, something that could well change soon). --fyodor