EdG wrote:
Wasn't Intel talking about using a high-speed interconnect a long time
ago, maybe a year or two before Opteron? GIO or something? What happened
with that?

Yeah, that was 3GIO, which became Arapahoe, which became PCI-Express.
That was in a futile attempt to derail any momentum building for AMD's
Hypertransport. Of course PCI-E is no competition for HT, it's much too
bloated to be a chip-to-chip interconnect. AMD never fell for it, and
kept HT as simple as possible while Intel threw as much bling-bling
into PCI-e to dazzle people with features.

Now it looks like AMD might even use PCI-e against Intel, if the
rumours about AMD building a PCI-e link directly into its processors
can be believed.

And not long ago I read somewhere Intel was going to use a dual bus like
the one AMD used on the Athlon MP, I can only hope that was false or
they have now dumped that too, I doubt it would get them far, still a
shared bus right?

Yeah, I think that was supposed to be in the Deerfield processor that
Intel just cancelled.

Yousuf Khan