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Buses and Interconnects: The Next Generation
mkarpinski writes "ExtremeTech has posted a nice overview of the next generation of peripheral buses and interconnects including PCI-X, InfiniBand, 3GIO, and HyperTransport. From the article, "All these future interconnects and buses have a few things in common. They use packet-based, point-to-point connections; in fact, InfiniBand implements a full switch fabric. They provide bandwidth in multiples of that offered by PCI. They decrease latency significantly, with HyperTransport and RapidIO showing the most dramatic decreases, crucial for their target communications and embedded markets. And all four strive to reduce pin counts in order to conserve power and system real estate." Open the floodgates!"
Well, IB lends itself to a lot of chassis chassis connections (SAN, failover, clustering, etc)... The others pretty much stick to planars, but IB could network globally (a stretch, but theoretically, it is all there). Since IB is an application to application protocol, it has quite a bit of reach...
Think - a generic server, boots from the IB link (possibly off of a SAN)... add more of these to the IB fabic as needed to increase the cluster. Great possibilities.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
RapidIO is in the PPC G5 roadmap and will be in moto's first g5-based chip. I've been drooling for some time now...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
API NetWorks just released a HyperTransport "Switch" , See the press release .
Interesting stuff. The PDF has some more info
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
The PC will not need bandwidth of this capability for some time. This bandwidth is needed right now in the networking/telecommunications, server and storage area. With networking technologies pushing into and beyong the 10Gbs bandwitdth arena, technologies such as PCI-X and Infiniband are here just in time. Companies such as Mellanox are exploiting these technologies (Infiniband) just in time for applications in these areas.
It also leads to other potential ideas. What about truly shared memory? Being able to put core memory for multiple processors in a distributed system? RapidIO will help us tie multiple processors together and share memory and I/O resources, and they will not need to be inches away, but possibly many many feet. The possibilities are truly endless with what we can do with this bandwidth.
Routers typically use standard I/O busses such as PCI to route packets between various I/O interfaces and the central CPUS. We now can increase the bandwidth up to OC-192 and 10GE with a standardized interface. This implies lower cost ASICs with common bus interfaces. No longer will companies need to develop their own ASICs with proprietary interfaces to support bandwidths capable of 10gigs...
Really cool technologies!
--Chris
Bluetooth vs 802.11b... there are two competing standards
These things aren't directly competing standards, one is for communication between a machine and it's peripherals, the other is for inter-machine communication. Bluetooth would not be very useful for coporate networking as the range isn't far enough, and 802.11b is to powerful for every device connected to every machine to be using in any rational manner in a corporate environment. There are some overlaps but these are not directly competing.
The other guy caught Bluetooth vs. 802.11b so I'll pick up USB vs. FireWire. What the fuck are you smoking? USB is a host based connection protocol and FireWire is a host independant protocol. That makes them not really even in the same ballpark. Just because they are both serial protocols don't mean jack shit. USB brokers all connections through a host controller, this host controller also acts as the switch for all communication on the bus. Everything has to pass through the host controller for any devices to talk to one another. FireWire is host independant which basically means every device on the bus is a peer of every other device (all devices are hosts). A FireWire DV camera can talk directly to a FW hard drive or DVD-RAM with no computer involved whatsoever. A USB webcam isn't going to be writing video to a USB hard drive any time soon because neither of them has a host controller. FireWire devices can also talk to each other directly rather than through a central host. Just because USB 2 is a high bandwidth version of USB doesn't mean it truely competes with FW. USB and FW are going to both be included in systems for a while since they both serve different purposes. You're not going to be seeing USB2 DV cameras for sale while FW cries in its corner.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.