[Beowulf] Benchmark between Dell Poweredge 1950 And 1435

[Joel Jaeggli]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 03:16:43PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> 
>> I don't disagree, although even their earliest pictures had more than
>> just CPU and memory hanging off the network.  As in CPU, memory, a PCI
>> bus and several direct attached devices were on most of the
>> transparencies that I recall of AMD's roadmap presentation 2-3 years
>> ago.
> 
> We were around 2-3 years ago. But think: what on a typical motherboard
> could be moved to HT that isn't aready there? Raid controller? gigE?
> No, both of these find PCIe plenty fast. It's only exceptional devices
> (video, high speed interconnect, coherant interconnect) that get a
> benefit.
> 
> Personally I've been kind of surprised that the video guys haven't
> attached directly to HT. nVidia could have put their graphics chip in
> their HT/PCIe bridge. I bet there's some economic reason that drives
> it.

Because the unit volume that makes the parts profitable to fab is
consumers putting $600 video-cards in $1000 pc's. Doing a one off for
say a quadro 45xx variant (card that would retail for $5000) probably
doesn't make sense... 40Gb/s is fast enough for their purposes right
now... keeping the 128 stream processors in an 8800gtx fed is taking
~690Gb/s which is well outside what you can pull across a port you can
find on a processor or north bridge anyway.

>> You might want to edit the widipedia page on this, as it states
>> "Hypertransport has largely fallen out of favor with the networking
>> community, in favor of SPI 4.2 and PCI-Express" which definitely implies
>> that at one time it was IN favor...:-)
> 
> That's referring to the network community, as in ethernet switches.
> There's a reason why SiByte and PMC Sierra and other folks have HT on
> their non-x86 cpus.

10Gb/s ethernet is now being driven by the commodity space. pci-e 4x and
8x slots are adequate attachment points for 10Gb cards. The motivation
for anything else is limited.

> -- greg
> 
> 
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