Intel Corp (INTC)

[pgerassi]

Wbmw:

Have we seen SiGe from AMD? No we have not.

As to extending the addressing in the FSB beyond 36 bits requires not only changes in the CPU, but in the chipsets and likely the socket as some idiot will put a 36 bit addr CPU in a 40 bit addr MB and wonder why he can't see anything over 64GB. And vice versa.

As to Woodcrest being in 128GB systems, that would require either 32 FB-DIMMs or 8GB FB-DIMMs. And still the CPUs won't see it because the virtual memory, page tables and TLBs would need to be changed from the EM64T specifications. Plus all of the OS software to boot. The latter two would be seen long before the CPUs and chipsets would support it. And that would be at least a minimum 12 month lag. And there are no changes noted in those documents in support of 40 bit addressing.

There were, but that came from Intel copying the AMD64 manuals and missing all of the relevant changes.

Pete

PS Clusters are different because the memory addresses are othogonal between nodes.