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To: John Koligman who wrote (70393)	10/27/1999 8:09:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

John - the wildfire architecture supports 2 PCI channels per 4P building block, each of which is 66MHz / 64 bit capable today, going to the PCI-X standard next year. Since it is a switch fabric linkage, any I/O can go to any system. The base bandwidth to a single PCI channel of I/O is over 500MB/S in current technology and will be 2GB/s next year. That's 4GB/s per 4-way block. So even a relatively small system can pump a whole lot of I/O. Each PCI channel can support 8 devices, but not all at full bandwidth, since individual devices may deliver over 100 MB/s which could use up the available channel bandwidth at 5 devices per channel. Still, a 32 way system, even in the first incarnation, can support 8 GB/s of I/O. I'm not current with today's channel-attached I/O rates but I think that the wildfire has enough horsepower to do about anything I can think of doing.

To: John Koligman who wrote (70393)	10/28/1999 8:46:00 AM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

John, Rude had a good reply regarding I/O. The one benefit that can't be overlooked versus 390s is the amount of memory. Future hardware will have 21364 CPUs and beyond and CPU to main memory bandwidth around 6 GByte/sec, interprocessor bandwidth of 10 GByte/sec and I/O bandwidth of 3.2 GByte/sec per CPU.. here are some details: theregister.co.uk That and the initial 32 CPU Wildfire will have 244 PCI busses, each bus a number of controller cards, each controller 40-80 disks, I think it can handle quite a few disks, i.e. storage. But more importantly since in a future setting with denser memories, Terabyte memory machines won't be that uncommon (2-4 years out) that memory makes for a great disk cache, in fact if you are mining a Terabyte of data, it fits in memory, etc. I suspect Wildfire and similar machines will scale far beyond mainframes in I/O capabilities .. this will take 2-4 years to come about but will happen. 64-bit strengths. Rob