AMD has gained some good support for its Torrenza platform which will make the manufacturer’s Opteron motherboards compatible with third party processors. Companies such as IBM and Sun has shown interest in Torrenza to make processors for AMD’s platform where HyperTransport is the key to success. We could conclude that this was hardly good news to Intel and it seems like the blue team felt the same. Intel has namely announced, during IDF, that it will launch an open chipset platform that can be used by other processors manufacturers. Extra interesting considering Intel’s previously strict use of its platforms.
What Intel first of all has to solve is the internal data handling with its motherboards. It has to get a good answer to AMD’s HyperTransport which can handle data much faster than just PCI Express.
“Interfacing directly with the front-side bus (FSB), devices will be able to communicate directly to the processor and or other accelerators. Non-Intel chips will be able to plug into a Xeon socket for example, and work parallel to the main processor or processors.”
According to DailyTech it seems that Intel will expand its plans to integrate the memory controller into its processors, but there will be a year or two before we will see the fruit of Intel’s labor with its open FSB platform. Until then AMD will have a headstart with its Torrenza concept.
