Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 18 Mar 1999 12:40:35 -0800 | From | David Hinds <> | Subject | Re: Ideas for abstracting driver IO from bus implementation? |
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Kind of an off topic question, I guess, but what is the point of I2O supposed to be, anyway? Based on this discussion, it sounds like I2O is not much more than asymmetric multiprocessing, where you've got special I2O processors sitting in various places (maybe on your motherboard, maybe on IO boards, maybe some combination) that just run driver code. Hasn't this concept been tried and abandoned enough times before? Looking at platforms with really high performance IO capabilities, they don't seem to rely on particularly smart IO devices. Which seems to tell me that current bus mastering IO designs are "smart enough", if your system has adequate bandwidth and your OS doesn't suck??
The only benefit I see is that it might offer better performance than an "equivalent" amount of SMP power if the host OS is particularly inefficient at handling SMP or IO. And maybe reduce FSB contention in Intel's primitive SMP architecture. And it lets Intel sell lots of I2O processors. Am I missing something??
-- Dave Hinds
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