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Intel Opens Its Front-Side Bus

Posted by kdawson on from the engineers-rampant-on-a-field-azure dept.

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.'"

5 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Not the first time by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This isn't the first time socket sharing has occured

    The old Socket 7 used to fit Intel and AMD and Cyrix.
    Hell, it can even house socket 5 cpus!

    Back then it wasn't a big deal to upgrade a CPU.

    All the companies started changing sockets at a frantic pace and made a simple CPU update essentially mean a whole machine.

    A new motherboard for the new socket but it also has new memory footprint as well so that gets replaced, and the PCIx slot won't fit my agp card.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
    1. Re:Not the first time by julesh · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Will this make it less confusing? by pzs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope so. Every time I have to upgrade my machine I have to spend an hour on the web working out the 700 different kinds of processor I can buy and what type of socket I need to support them.

    I had an AMD Duron 800MHz that I tried to replace with an Athlon 1300MHz which should have been supported, but created a nifty column of smoke when I plugged it in. Anything that reduces that likelihood is good in my book.

    Peter

  3. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    so why would anybody want to plug in an AMD processor there unless it was hugely cheaper or more powerful?

    For starters, intel's frontside bus is just that, a good old-fashioned FSB that hasn't changed much in years.

    AMD's processors have something completely different. Not only is it physically incompatible, it's actually "Hypertransport" which is marketing speak for a chip-to-chip interconnect. Look at all the big iron manufacturers supporting it. Note no intel. AMD has been shipping these processors since 2003. Intel's (incompatible) equivalent isn't due out until 2008. Other manufacturers have been shipping CPUs with similar interconnects since the mid 1990s (UltraSPARC, MIPS).

    AMD processors implement NUMA via this interconnect. Each CPU can have its own local memory. On an intel system, all processors compete for bandwidth over the shared FSB

    This is why Opteron/Athlon 64 systems scale well past 2 processors. This is also why it will be easier to make e.g. graphics processors that fit in AMD motherboards.

    intel processors may currently do better on selected synthetic benchmarks and niche applications. AMD, however, has a far more sophisticated, modern and scalable platform. Intel set sail on the itanic.

  4. AMD vs. Intel, but not so literally. by damacus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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