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

To: Elmer who wrote (60508)	6/4/1999 1:21:00 AM
From: Marco Polo	Respond to of 1571689

Thanks Elmer, you explained that very well. Even I could follow it! This whole port concept is intriguing.

To: Elmer who wrote (60508)	6/4/1999 1:30:00 AM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571689

Elmer, Re:"It might be valuable to define the difference between a bus and a port. I'm going to take a stab at it but I can't be certain I'm completely correct. First, a bus allows for multiple entities to access it, so there must be an arbitration protocol directly for the bus, a port has no such requirements because it isn't shared. Second, a bus has a different transmission line signature because of the multiple entities that may or may not be attached. For example the PCI bus may have 1-4 or more devices attached. A port is much easier to impedence match because the loading is fixed and does not change with regards to capacitance or length. The K7 system architecture uses processor ports. A different port is required for each processor in a multiprocessor system. The P6 architecture uses a system bus which is shared between 1-4 different processors." This will be my last post on this as you are right on the big picture. It's just that the point to point approach that AMD uses is a bus. It's just specialized down to only having the chipset sitting on that bus. Now system designers may well be using your terminology. As an example if you look at the memory chip: it has pins that are called the adress bus, and data coming out -- yes the data bus. And its still a bus wether it's got one item tacked on it or 8 items tacked on it. Sorry for being so anal on this -- nuff said. Regards, Kash