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PCI 3.0 Coming; Intel gets the Green Light.
pjbass writes "This story on ZDnet discusses the next I/O subsystem planned for PC's. It will be PCI 3.0 once making it to the consumers, but it is now known as Arapahoe, or 3GIO. Intel Corp. is responsible for making the technology, and boast its performance will be about 6 times that of PCI2.x, getting up to speeds of 6.6 gigabytes per second of bandwidth initially, with promises to scale more once the technology is mainstream."
It is done by a consortium, led by Intel - but not run exclusively by them - even AMD are on board with it. I think you can safely assume that a published spec will be available (if one is not already around?).
One thing I was wondering though - is what use is HyperTransport? I always thought that it was marketed as a replacement bus architecture, but I guess not given that they want 3GIO as well!
Reading it closely makes me feel as if AMD is trying to curry favor with Intel
or maybe AMD realizes that Intel owns the market and to not support PCI 3.0 would mean PITA for hardware vendors and suicide for AMD.
cpeterso
Don't confuse Hypertransport functionality with PCI 3.0, as an eetimes article explains AMD's logic for voting to support the new intel standard, http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010803S0080
Reading it closely makes me feel as if AMD is trying to curry favor with Intel for some odd reason while at the same time promoting their own technology.... They do overlap in a few areas, but I am curious if their support for the new PCI 3.0 standard will make it harder for them to sell HT as they will have to work to differentiate it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yep we will see boards with both slots. It will kind of be like boards nowadays having both ISA and PCI. It really won't be that big of a deal, the industry has done this slot switching stuff before without that much of a problem.
How about 10 Gbit ethernet? A few such interfaces should put some load on the bus, so maybe a router working with 10 Gbit could need the bandwidth.
Phobos - Greek word for fear or flight
Obviously it IS the legality of the standard they are interested in. They will all want to go over the spec with a fine tooth comb to make sure they don't wind up with another RAMBUS fiasco.
Yes, I realize RAMBUS's patents werent actually published at time of the memory standards meeting, they were still pending, but that whole incident has definately raised the amount of due diligence companies are putting into the legal end of standards committees. It makes no sense for AMD to endorse the standard going forward if, for example, it wound up that they would have to pay Intel a bunch of royalties on every chip they sold because they needed to use some patented method for the CPU to talk to add-in cards over this bus.
I am not surprised that patents for one bus technology are reused in another bus. But that does not make the second bus a variant of the first bus. It makes sense to reuse good ideas!
EV6 IS NOT the same bus as HyperTransport. They are not even similar, except maybe for some low-level things.
EV6 does not use LVDS.
EV6 is not a bidirectional (full duplex) bus (X data lines one way, and Y data lines the other way), instead all of the data lines are use for communications in both directions (half-duplex).
EV6 is a processor (Alpha or Athlon/Duron) to northbridge bus. Hypertransport is a chip interconnection technology for the future.
EV6 is not packet driven, unlike HyperTransport.
EV6 is a point-to-point bus. Hypertransport can have 32 devices on a single bus, via a hub architecture (i.e., you could say it is a lot of point-to-point busses connected together, but the addressing allows for 32 devices)
and there are such a lot of other things that are different.
You're so far off base it's incredible. And you have the specifications? Have you thought of reading them? If your job requires you to work with these busses, and you do not even know the difference between them, then I feel sorry for your employers.
Why does a consumer machine need this when PCI 64 bit, or 66mhz hasn't gotten into the market? The 3 types of machines I ever see these slots on are servers, very high end workstations, and Apple systesm.
Also, where does PCI-X fit into all this?
Well when you have that kind of bandwidth on the PCI bus, doesn't it seem a little redundant to have the AGP port expense on the the bridge chips?
Will everyone who bought AGP 4X graphic cards have to abandon them again like they left the PCI platform before? Anyway I'm still plugging along with an old PCI card and maybe I'll be glad I stayed there.
"a powerful and unexpected ally..."
Patent lawyers often have two degrees - one in law, and one in the field that they're working in.
A friend of mine finished his biochemistry degree and is now studying law. This will not only open up more doors for him, but make him a slightly more competent lawyer if he chooses that career path.