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Re: Tenchu post# 56918

Thursday, 06/02/2005 10:55:35 PM

Thursday, June 02, 2005 10:55:35 PM

Post# of 98415
Re: I/O devices access memory directly.

There certainly are cases where DMA operations support a fair amount of I/O activity that isn't dependent on the CPU, like a simple disk copy, but they are periodic cases, and almost always cases where the system is otherwise basically idle and we don't care about CPU bandwidth. The northbridges on AMD systems enjoy the same advantages as you are well aware.

But when TCP control or encryption or compression or sorting or comparison or rendering etc. is going, on, the data is streamed into the CPU and out to memory (it may be being concurrently streamed as DMA block I/O moves, but that's handled the same way in both architectures and has nothing to do with CPU bandwidth).

On an Athlon 64 and Opteron, data streams in through hypertransport data lines and out through the additional memory data lines. On Pentium M, Pentium 4, and Xeon, it streams in on the same data lines it's trying to stream out on - a bottleneck.

I understand that you're pretty upset that Intel appears to have totally screwed the pooch in mobile as well as desktop, but there's no need to start posting nonsense because of it.

"Intel is promising EM64T support in Yonah" http://67.19.9.2/?article=19149

Too bad.

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