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Intel Opens Its Front-Side Bus
vivin writes "The Inquirer is reporting that Intel has opened up its FSB. Intel did this during IDF 07. What this means is that you can plug non-Intel things into the Intel CPU socket. The article says 'This shows that Intel is willing to take AMD seriously as a competitive threat, and is prepared to act upon it. In addition to this breaking one of the most sacred taboos at Intel, it also hints that engineering now has the upper hand over bureaucracy.'"
AMD opened their HyperTransport bus, royalty free, in 2001. They've signed people like Sun and Cisco, who have a big interest in moving a lot of data on buses. And if you get people using your bus, you can easily talk them into using your processors in their embedded devices.
That was a while ago, but I suspect it's coming to fruition or perhaps gaining more traction, if only now Intel is saying "me too."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-528221.html
I don't have the knowledge to pick a bus based on merit but, from what I've read, Hypertransport is better. Can anyone with experience here chime in?
Do we want Hypertransport or Intel's bus? What about licensing?
HT can run with approximately twice the number of transfers per second per pin as current-generation Intel FSBs. HT is also more readily expandible to use more pins, because it's an autonegotiating variable-width bus, similar to PCI-express. It also wastes fewer pins on control signals. HT is clearly the best, technologically.
Licensing wise, HT is licensed "royalty-free" for an annual fee. I don't believe the fee is particularly large. Many chip producers have already licensed it and will license modules to connect your own chip design to it for very small fees. Such modules exist on some modern FPGAs. This is not currently true of the Intel FSB spec.