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!"

Comments

Re:one can only hope...

[Salamander]

You've got multiple standards that are totally incompatible with each other

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.

and yet neither of them has any true advantage over the other

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.