[rescue] Hardware failure

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 @ 11:29 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > This is especially true if AMD motherboards finally start having 
> > multiple HT links instead of just a single main one.
> 
> You mean boards like this one, that have been on the market for years?

The product you mentioned:

> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131059

Has only a single main HT link for system I/O.

I think you must be talking about the SMP HT link between the CPUs.
*ALL* SMP system for AMD CPUs use HT links, and that's not what I'm
talking about.

I mean multiple HT links for system I/O.

Right now, unless you can show me an example otherwise, all PCs with HT
are currently using HT as a frontside bus, with the CPU as master, and
several slave hosts on it, usually northbridge and southbridge.  My own
motherboard also puts SATA on HT.

Yes, I suppose from a certain point of view that's multiple HT links
since the physical traces to run host->host, but they are all sharing
the same bandwidth, so I call that one bus.

To have more than one with unshared bandwidth, you need some kind of
crossbar or interconnect fabric.

I've seen that kind of thing at the high end, and a bit of it in the
Apple G5, but I can't find any PC motherboards that do that.

Anyway, Intel is promising PCIe interconnect fabricts "real soon now",
so it seems reasonable to expect AMD and its partners to counter with
something.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]