Posted on Tuesday, December 13 2005 @ 1:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel is preparing the CSI high-speed serial interconnect as an answer to AMD's HyperTransport and the company is already telling its customers that is has AMD beat, starting in 2008, The Register
reports.
Intel's CSI high-speed serial interconnect was first meant to appear in a Xeon chip code-named Whitefield. That processor, however, met an untimely death as Intel India mucked up the CSI implementation and forced Intel to rework its plans. As of last check, Intel will now introduce CSI in the Tukwila version of Itanium due out in 2008.
Our sources indicate that an inexperienced Indian staff and not the technology itself was to blame for the Whitefield CSI miss. Intel has been telling customers that CSI will deliver all of the benefits of Hypertransport. And it will be found on chips with integrated memory controllers, putting Intel back on par with AMD.
But Intel isn't aiming to get on par with AMD, they want to take the performance lead. It looks like CSI will have a lot lower latency and if Intel is telling the truth the Xeon vs Opteron performance may end up pretty even in 2008.
