Reply to post: Re: PCIe? Yeurk!

Need speed? Then PCIe it is – server power without the politics

bazza Silver badge

Re: PCIe? Yeurk!

@AC,

Thanks for posting that, I'm going to eat some TOFU!

No worries. It's a cool architecture, you can even buy one if you want to!

Current interconnect technology is pretty much brain-dead, when you consider that there is no link between software architectures and the hardware they run on

It's not that bad. Intel and AMD have both done very well in making an old fashioned programming model (SMP) work well in a general sense by emulating it in NUMA architectures (That's what QPI and Hypertransport do). We've all got better performance without having to redevelop software or OSes. In that sense Intel and AMD have both done very well. However if you want all out performance then you have to do something different, e.g. Tofu.

Interconnects and their switches are becoming a bit of a problem. They're now costing $billions to develop, and the markets that can support that development cost are few. Ethernet will be the only medium / long range interconnect worth having in a few years. We're already seeing HDDs with Ethernet instead of SATA. Ethernet switches will get developed regardless, in which case would it ever be worth doing, say, a competitive PCIe switch chip? I think it highly likely that computer architectures will coalesce around Ethernet and DDRx eventually.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon