HardwareBanter - View Single Post - Intel announces "Nehalem" - 8-core CPU with mem-controller + graphic capabilities

**David Kanter**

On Apr 27, 6:22 am, Bill Davidsen wrote:
David Kanter wrote:
On Apr 3, 6:16 am, Bill Davidsen wrote:
AirRaid wrote:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...703291555DOWJO...
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) - A major computer-chip redesign at Intel
Corp. will likely put more pressure on smaller rival Advanced Micro
Devices Inc., industry observers said Thursday.
Intel (INTC) is working on a new computer chip called Nehalem that
will integrate the microprocessor -- the central processing unit in a
PC - with the chip's memory controller.
Intel currently uses external memory in separate products known as
chipsets that fetch data from different parts of the computer. The
Nehalem chip should help Intel relieve performance bottlenecks in its
current family of chips, analysts said.
AMD chips have had the two features combined for several years now, a
technology edge that has helped the company take market share from its
larger rival.
Like most press releases, this one presents the spin the writer wanted,
rather than a neutral technical viewpoint. The pros and cons of external
memory controllers have been discussed here before, and I won't rehash,
but the bottom line is that any assumption that integrated or external
memory control is "better" ignores the fact that is a tradeoff.

The IBM maximum performance chipset discussed about two years ago is a
case in point, providing higher bandwidth and lower latency through
increased complexity in the memory subsystem. As I recall, it was
multiway interleave, integrated L3 cache, and CPU to CPU cache bypass
(not through main memory). And I admit I didn't dig back in the archives
for the details, either.

--
Bill Davidsen
He was a full-time professional cat, not some moonlighting
ferret or weasel. He knew about these things.

Perhaps you mean IBM's X3 chipset:

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cf...WT042405213553

It has a snoop filter, and can use the memory as a virtual cache for
remote data.

*Thank you*, that's the hardware I had in mind, and I had only seen a
page on the memory controller. The link you have is as good on the
memory and covers a lot of other scaling issues which are interesting in
themselves.

Thanks for the compliment - I wrote the article in question and I
pride myself on good content.

David