[SLUG] Re: PCI-Express now seems to be the price/performance mainstay for Linux

From: Bryan J. Smith (b.j.smith@ieee.org)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 10:55:36 EST


On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 10:18, Levi Bard wrote:
> Aren't there any AMD-8xxx chipset boards with PCIE yet?

No, and there won't be. The AMD8000 was just the 1st gen, much like the
AMD750 was for the previous 32-bit Athlon. AMD is not in the business
of mass producing chipsets.

The nVidia nForce4 and ViA KT890 solutions will be the first to offer a
HyperTransport-to-PCI-Express bridge for Socket-754/939/940.

Of course, the AMD8000 is not really a chipset in the traditional
sense. Any HyperTransport tunnel/bridge can be connected to any
HyperTransport channel. Which means that you take use _both_ an nVidia
nForce4 connected to one CPU, and an AMD8131 connected to another like
so:
  http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0411b/0411b_f7.htm

Which is what the IWill DK8ES offers:
  http://www.iwill.com.tw/sppage/2004_10/2004_10.htm

It's just a respin of the same approach the prior IWill DK8N used
(nForce3 250 + AMD8131):
  http://www.iwill.com.tw/product_2.asp?p_id=27

One thing to remember that the conventional "north+south" concept is
largely broken in HyperTransport -- at least for the AMD8000 series.
Engineers can glue whatever HyperTransport tunnels/bridges they need for
whatever peripheral capability desired.

> The amd chipsets seem to be MUCH better supported than either the via or
> nforce chipsets...

You mean the integrated peripherals are. That's because AMD's ATA/LPC
is largely the same, 4+ year old 75x logic. nVidia's are about the same
now too -- full support in the stock i810 driver set. It was just a
matter of time.

ViA seems to have a nasty habit of changing things and not being
backward compatible with older logic.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                 b.j.smith@ieee.org 
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