AMD heeft een 8-Way SMP Chipset voor de AMD Athlon aangekondigd. Hoewel AMD niet te veel wil vertellen heeft CPU Review alvast wat info.
Their claim to fame is a "point-to-point switched fabric architecture"; basically a gigantic crossbar switch for processors, memory and peripherals that they call "Simultaneous Switched Matrix (tm)" abbreviated as SSM.In case you are not familiar with such technology it is essentially a "router" for signals between processors and memory. Just like Ethernet switches it tries to implement a point-to-point link between the devices.
HotRail's site describes their SSM device as being appropriate for SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) systems with up to eight processors; they document their devices as having up to fourteen ports (for processors, memory and peripherals) with each port providing up to 3.2Gb/sec bandwidth.
The idea is:
- CPU#1 could retrieve information from memory port #1 while
- CPU#2 was writing to memory port #3 while
- an I/O controller is writing to memory port #3 from I/O port 1
And all of these devices can communicate over the SSM without excessive delays introduced due to arbitration (and cache coherency checks).
This is an excellent idea; and similar ideas have been used in super-computers to increase performance.
Best wel heavy stuff... 
