New gigabit ethernet adaptor to use hypertransport

[Mark R]

As reported by the inquirer:
<a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7545" target=_blank>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7545</A>

An interesting idea to allow a gigabit ethernet interface to operate without the PCI bus bottleneck. I wonder when we will start seing boards with such an integrated controller.

 

[cmetz]

It'll help, but there are several other pieces of your system (DRAM most notably) holding back performance at gigabit levels that the faster bus might not improve things nearly as much as you might think.

I'm also a tad skeptical of putting lots of things on HyperTransport. This is shades of VLB all over again. You don't want random I/O stuff on the primary bus between your CPU and memory, it's a recipe for instability.