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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (36982)	4/22/2001 2:49:52 PM
From: milo_morai	Respond to of 275872

760MP - Transaction Concurrency So, what does the 760MP do that's so special? We should know empirically in the next couple of months, although exactly when we get our hands on a system is still up in there, but AMD did send me a presentation which I have liberally copied from to lay out some of the finer points of the 760MP. For one thing, you get both Athlons interfacing to memory at 266MHz. The 760MP is acting as a sort of switch between the CPUs and memory. That's one big plus. It also means that you might get a more expensive 760MP chipset to accommodate the two data paths from the CPUs. But, Tom did say in one of his recent articles that AMD needed to get some high quality chipsets for the CPUs, to compete head on with Intel, and this may be the instance where they are stepping up the plate. tomshardware.com All images courtesy of AMD The other thing that the 760MP does is that it ensures cache coherency. That's why I wrote the See Spot Run primer on shared memory parallelism, and threads, folks. Again, the switch concept comes into play nicely here. In the typical bus based system, each processor would be asking for control of the bus, but in the AMD model, again similar to the Alpha, the connection is unidirectional point-to-point, which means that it is high bandwidth. In fact, as AMD moves up to a 400MHz FSB, it can achieve a 6.4 GB/s throughput on memory, and I have a feeling that they will be there this year. The control circuitry in the 760MP is not only there to make sure that you get a high bandwidth connection between the two Athlons and main memory, it is also there to ensure transaction coherency using the L1 and L2 caches of the Athlon with reduced latency. tomshardware.com