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

To: milo_morai who wrote (100304)	3/27/2000 7:21:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577883

Milo, <ZDnet shows only a performance gain when you have 4 to 32 clients any more than 32 or less then 4 shows Zero Gain> This is a normal performance curve for servers. When the number of clients are low, you don't need much performance anyway. At a certain number, you'll get the maximum efficiency possible. Beyond that, you've exceeded the capacity of the server, which means it's time to add another server. <How many Servers out there that are 8 way are only serving 30 people.. NOT MANY> That's 30 clients at one time, all flooding the server with transactions. Obviously in the real world, each 8-way server is going to be handling hundreds of clients at one time, but only a small fraction of them will submit transactions at a time. <IMO this is due to the GTL+ Bus being shared.. LDT should kick GTL+'s butt.> First of all, LDT is not a replacement for the processor bus. Rather, it's a chip-to-chip interface for servers. It seems that for AMD's processors, there can be a maximum of two per north bridge. LDT is then used to chain those north bridges together into one coherent system. In this way, AMD can glue 2-way SMP building blocks together and create 4-way and 8-way servers (and beyond). Let me repeat: LDT is NOT a replacement for Athlon's EV6 interface. The point-to-point EV6 will still be used to connect each processor to a north bridge. And second, if Intel's GTL+ bus is a limitation, why is Intel continuing to use it for Merced, Willamette, and Foster? I can't comment on plans beyond that, but I can tell you there's still a lot of life left in that shared bus. AMD's claim of "superior point-to-point architecture" is nothing but marketing. <SO MY POINT is Corrected from 5% to ZERO above 32 users..LOL> And yet those Profusion-based servers are selling very well (for a low-volume 8-way product). Why is that? Maybe it's because OEMs like Compaq know more about the performance advantages of Profusion than you do? (Heck, Compaq even helped design part of the Profusion chipset. Obviously if Profusion's performance sucks compared to 4-way server, Compaq wouldn't have invested real R&D into the thing.) Tenchusatsu