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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!"
Even though we (myself included) always complain about all the "standards" there are, it really is a good thing in the long run. Even thought I hate having to deal with stuff like which keyboard to i need for this system (USB, PS2, Big DIN connector), it is good. I know the best usually wins. It's just like ISA vs. PCI vs. AGP, USB 2 vs. Firewire, SCSI vs. IDE, (yes, I know those are not apples vs. apples, but you get my point). Eventually, we just have to wait it out, and then buy whoemever the winner is. The unfortunate part is that the early adopters (a lot of slashdot readers) are the ones that pay the high price for new technology, but that's the way it goes.
However, if we look at trends in 5 to 10 year periods, we can clearly see what technology won the battle for existence and standards. The best technologo doesn't ALWAYS win (think Windows Media...), but more often than not, and that gives time to sort out the better from the good. Right now, though, we do live with a lot of different, competing standards that are quite frustrating.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
But they don't all do the same things. Yes, there is some overlap, and it would be a great surprise if all five survived, but it's not hard to imagine a system that used HyperTransport or RapidIO chip-to-chip, PCI-X or 3GIO as an internal bus, and InfiniBand for SAN/clustering.
Oh, but they do. They all have different latency/throughput balances, different levels of coherency and parallelism and switchability, and different backwards-compatibility stories. The differences are more subtle than, say, USB vs. FC, but they do exist.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
By the time any technology filters down to the consumer level, it's already obsolete. Your PC will always be obsolete; get over it. If you wait for every competing technology battle to settle down, you'll never upgrade. Take USB vs FireWire or Bluetooth vs 802.11b, or IDE vs SCSI. In each case, there are two competing standards which don't show any signs of going away - because each has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Don't go looking for this techology to be in PC's any time soon. As other people have said, the first place this is going to be adopted is in high-end applications like telecom switches and storage arrays.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I was reading through the article, and one question kept coming to my mind. It's great that they are coming up with higher bw busses, but it seems it will only help for I/O. What about memory? I know we have the 266MHz (I think) DDR memory, but how much is that really helping? How will memory access be affected by all of this?
sigged out...
Apple was one of the early members of the HyperTransport consortium... what does this say about the G5's motherboard architecture?
It probably means Apple is hedging their bets.
OTOH, Apple likes nVidia, Apple likes HT, nVidia likes HT... nForce for PowerPC anyone?