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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!"
"Many people still don't fully understand and cannot effectively differentiate InfiniBand from PCI-X from RapidIO, or 3GIO from HyperTransport, for example."
geez, what are you guys, a bunch of idiots? I can't *believe* that some people STILL don't fully understant inifiBand form PCI-X from RapidIO, or 3GIO! What is the world coming to?
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
...that only ONE of these standards actually goes mainstream and takes the place of PCI. This reminds me of the DVDR-W versus DVDR+W conflict that's going on right now. You've got multiple standards that are totally incompatible with each other, and yet neither of them has any true advantage over the other.
Hopefully one standard will emerge, so I can *safely* proceed with upgrading my PC hardware without fear of immeidate obsolescence.
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
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.
API NetWorks just released a HyperTransport "Switch" , See the press release .
Interesting stuff. The PDF has some more info
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
This article misses one crucial standard: PCIX 2.0. While not highly publicized it has some key features that make it more likely to show up in high performance systems that 3GIO. The PCIX 2.0 standard is due to be finalized at about the same time as the 3GIO standard will.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Why do hardware makers insist on using marketroid-designed names? I'm going to stay with PCI until somebody comes up with a new type of bus: the Magic Bus.
Every day, I put a request on the queue.
Ooh yeah, it's the MAGIC BUS!
To get on the bus to my CPU.
Ooh yeah, the MAGIC BUS!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
The "killer application" for these technologies (at least HyperTransport and RapidIO) is mostly very high-end telecom infrastructure equipment. My last job involved working on the definition of a HyperTransport bridge product that was targeted for these types of systems. A good serialized interconnect is needed in these systems, as nothing else comes close in terms of speed and latency.
PCI-X is also becoming very useful as a telecom backplane connector, and for drive arrays in high-end servers.
Of course your message was completely stupid in the first place. Why is it that so many people on slashdot look at every technology as though the PC is the only important system on the planet? It's fine that all you use is your desktop PC, and it's fine that you wait for the most commoditized solutions to filter down to your local PC shop, but despite what you might think, the world doesn't revolve around PCs. Perhaps you'll want a HyperTransport video card in 2004, but your major Internet backbones aren't going to be connected through AGP4x today. Do yourself a favour and get a more rounded technical education.
- j
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...
...the intelligent switching of devices on the bus. Having a packet-switched bus controller is important (and I've worked on the design of an Infiniband controller so it can work), but even having the application passing parameters to the bus controller is important. For example, should a network card in a workstation take priority away from the video capture card?
Consequence to the capture card: dropped frames, necessitates recapture.
Consequence to the network card: dropped network packets.
Bandwidth is important, but again - the application must drive the necessity for the bandwidth. Intelligent switching and caching in addition to the increased bandwidth are necessary.
ALSO, one important point - architectures such as HyperTransport are essentially point-to-point, so you need multiple HyperTransport interfaces per switch IC - something that will drive the costs up. Hopefully low-speed devices can all be dropped on the 1394b or USB2.0 buses and then those can be handled through specialized south bridges on PCs, for example. For high-end network apps, obviously the switching of multiple buses leading to optical driver modules is basically the application itself.
Well for one, mechanical hard drives have had their day in the sun and probably in the next 10 years or so having say a 15GB SSD (solid state drive - basically a drive made from nonvolatile memory) won't be unheard of. In such a case we'll have "instant on" computers and then you should really see a big difference in thinks like Hypertransport vs. AGP. Right now mechanical devices are big hindrances to electronic parts, just as electronic parts are to say fiber optics.
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?