Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

Yes they are complimentary and do not conflict. But that's not the issue here. The problem is that Opteron has an integrated the memory controller. This is great for low latency memory/processor operations, but not for I/O systems. Opteron is pin restricted. It doesn't have a PCI Express bus. But it has a HT bus, which then must be converted into a PCI Express bus. This takes extra latency and is not efficient.

Opteron currently has 3 HT links. 2 for interprocessor communication, and 1 for communicating to the chipset. Suppose they drop the 1 HT link that is currently used to connect to chipset and replace it with a PCI express interconnect. Perhaps this is a possible plan for them.

Even without this, is translation going to be that big of an issue? Are we going to go back to the place where video cards start relying heavily on system memory again? The bottleneck today is not the pipe between the video card and the CPU. It once was, but with so much function moved to the graphics card, it is less important. Latency is not really an issue for transfering textures from main memory to video memory - bandwidth is. So even with a translation hub, I don't think AMD is going to be hurt by having an on die memory controller and a PCI Express translation hub with the next generation of video cards. I'm not sure why you think they wouldn't work at all.