Re: PCIe? Yeurk!
@Trevor Potts,
Patents, standards, yes they all cost money. But they're nothing like as expensive as reinventing it all over again.
Hypertransport doesn't work outside the box because it was never designed to do so. Going a few centimetres across a motherboard is, from an electrical and protocol point of view, very different to going between chassis. PCIe is a bit better than Hypertransport, but it's slower and wasn't designed for inter chassis connections either.
As Justicesays points out in the post above you cannot ignore the speed of transmission over a longer distance. Taking account of it means changing the protocol and charging how you utilise it in an application. You are more or less forced into an openmpi style approach to application design. You cannot ever hope to have a single memory address space such as an SMP architecture gives you, it's performance would be terrible. Protocols like hypertransport, QPI and PCIe (which are all about SMP really) are not very appropriate.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
