On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 23:23 -0300, Alvaro Kuolas wrote:
HyperTransport it's not a "free standard" (like OpenGL).
HyperTransport _is_ a standards consortium. It's used for all sorts of system interconnects.
What is sopping AMD, nVidia or ATI tho make that HTX thing you said?
HTX already exists. But it's used for non-commodity Infiniband and little else. There are a few high-end visualization systems that are incorporating a GPU for it -- but nothing commodity. The key is to make it commodity for GPUs. GPUs would greatly benefit from being directly on the system interconnect. Intel doesn't offer a flexible system interconnect, but AMD does.
They have the engineers, the technology, the money... maybe the lack of Intel's POWER.
Correct. AMD has lots of R&D money to throw at ATI and nVidia. AMD does not. Hence why ATI and nVidia won't put the R&D towards development a HTX GPU. But if AMD bought ATI, they'd instantly have all that GPU IP. So they could create a GPU on the native HyperTransport system interconnect with Opteron/Athlon 64. The first version would a chipset integrated GPU that was directly on the HyperTransport system interconnect. After that would come video cards for the HTX slot.
BTW: BTX it's not near... any soon,
Huh? BTX is a form-factor. Totally different story. BTX offers _no_value_ over ATX -- especially not flipped ATX. HTX offers _real_value_ over PCIe. The GPU is directly put on the system interconnect, instead of being on the peripheral interconnect with lots of (proprietary) software hacks -- most of which is IP owned by Intel (with the resulting IP issues for Linux).
so Intel's POWER(TM by IBM) it's not so big. Thanks goes to Taiwan for that one.
BTX offers _little_ value. HTX would offer _great_ value. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------- Illegal Immigration = "Representation Without Taxation" -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com