Parhelia. PCI- X

[Bigg]

Originally posted by Chrono_Wanderer
I think some versions of the medical parhelia boards are based on PCI-X...

edit: and of course no PCI-express yet...

thats cool... a xeon workstation with a p and a r300!!!

[WayneHu]

It seems the PCI Express architecture is similar to the current switch network design. The routing job is still within the the central Hub (main chip) which uses the parallel bus for forwarding or transmittion. Thus the lantency overhead does not look like the stupid RDRAM.

Of course, there will be some overhead between the protocol conversion like CPU-AGP, CPU-PCI bus bridges, which operates in different speeds, bus widths.

To take the advantage of serial memory interface, the CPU bus had better be also multiple-channeled serial bus. Thus it can reduced the CPU pin-count for basic performance and is easy to increase the CPU cache replacement efficiency by using multiple cache MMUs which each one is assigned with the different external memory space. The SMP interconnection is much easier in this way. However, the cache coherence issue is still there once the CPU bus contains multiple memory interfaces.

For the good performance of serial communication, the number of dynamic routing has to be descreased to the mininum value. Otherwise, it will suffer from the latency overhead even the interconnection speed is high.

Since the current interconnection timing is 2.5GHz, which is a mature electric-optical signal conversion frequency, it might be easy to expand the whole bus topology far away by optical interconnection.

[Wombat]

Optical connections are handy, but only when you're connecting things that you can't get physically close enough for reasonable electrical connections. Conversion between the two mediums is costly and high-latency.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Originally posted by Kurt
PCI 64bits is also better than what we all have...

Not when Via is doing PCI-X

[The PIT]

I shudder thinking about all the high speed data corruption.

[rylan]

Yeah, if you've got a controler for each pci-x then it runs at full speed. Fear when Via releases their '4-in-1 controler chip'. :P

[Kurt]

Originally posted by The PIT
I shudder thinking about all the high speed data corruption.

hmmm...I wonder if there'd be a way to show all that corruption on a screen and create nice video (psychedelic) effects...at least you'd get some benefit from your VIA chipset...