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To: Paul Engel who wrote (42733)	6/5/2001 1:38:23 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

Paul, I think Intel would - and COULD - do even better simply by COMBINING the Northbridge and Southbridge functions on a single die. That would ELIMINATE the need for ANY signal transfers - and HT - and result in even faster communications between the two functions - since they would reside on the same piece of silicon. Sis is doing this already, so they have no need for fast connection. But their chipset is limited in the type of devices it supports. There are many high bandwidth devices that (current and future) devices it doesn't support, such as 64bit 66 MHz PCI, infiniband etc. Another good candidate is the connection to graphics card. If all these connections are placed on one (Northbridge + Southbridge) chip, you are talking a nightmare of the chip with thousands of pins. The place with the greatest need for fast communications inside a box is in servers, that's why I think it would be a good idea for Intel to jump onboard. I would not be surprised if the future versions of ServerWorks chipsets used HT, since the new parent of ServerWorks seems to be on the HT bandwagon. I don't know which partitioning of logic inside the computers makes sense going forward, but I have a feeling that in servers, combining CPU and Northbridge will provide the most bang (and ban for the buck). Suppose you have a 2+ way server motherboard that has a channel of memory attached directly to the CPU, which itself is sitting on top of the HT bus. You buy the machine with 1 CPU, and 1 channel of RAM populated. Later on, as the need arises, you add a 2nd CPU, populate the second channel and basically double the performance, since the bandwidth available doubled as well. And the complexity of designing such motherboard is not overwhelming, since the CPU + memory channel combinations would be just building blocks, not interfearing with each other much. In consumer PCs, NVidia partitioning seems to make the most sense, of combining Northbridge and Graphics seems to be the way to go, since the same memory controller can serve graphics and CPU. Joe