[Beowulf] Benchmark between Dell Poweredge 1950 And 1435

[Greg Lindahl]

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.

> 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.

-- greg