Xserve DDR setup a Hack, or Innovative design???

onlooker

I was looking at this setup, and started remembering ideas that we used to talk about that we thought were innovative at the time of the Raycer/Graphics aquisition.

Things like a secondary Quarts accelerater processor, and/or an OpenGL excelerator processing engine built into this fabulous UMA-2 we had imagined in our minds. This was all disgussed here well over a year, and 1/2 ago. It also had USB 2.0, FireWire2, DDR RAM, and some questionable things we were thinking, and disgussing at the time like PCIX, Serial ATA, and other stuff that made for hot topics at the time.

People keep refering to the Xserve's DDR setup as a Hack - in a bad way, but it looks more like it could be an early entry into future Mobo architecture.



Any thoughts?

randycat99

That's exactly the way I see it, too. It is just getting stuff staged for when we see the real G4 successor. Ideally, both should have come at the same time, but we all know about the CPU situation. So you take what you can get, when you get it. Hopefully, everything will line-up sometime down the line.



In fact, I see absolutely nothing wrong with introducing DDR functionality "early" onto the motherboard. The mistake was probably making a public announcement about DDR prior to having both key factors in place (CPU & chipset). Making a silent introduction of this change would probably have generated less ire. ...But then there would be much discussion and speculation over why DDR RAM chips are being specified for this motherboard- is this a DDR or not? So I guess you get drawbacks either way you choose.



The bright side- at least it is 333, not 2xx, right?



[ 08-14-2002: Message edited by: Randycat99 ]</p>

michael x. s.

people are so quick to assume that this implimentation of ddr is faked or limp because the processor's don't have the ability to operate on a bus of that fashion...



my take on it is that as the wintel world found a clever way to avoid the absurd costs of creating a 200mhz front side bus by double and quad pumping a slower one, apple has approached the same problem its own way, just as it approaches mhz differently.



with wintel, all the components of the computer fight for bandwidth on the bus... but with this xserve implimentation, it actually takes advantage of the g4's having limited bandwidth, by not making the system be limited by any one component. the processors (hopefully with the 167mhz bus) get saturated and aren't as data starved as they used to be, the ddr ram now has 2.7gbps throughput, and even though only half of that can be used by the main processors, thinkabout everything else in your system, like the cd/dvd, the hard drives, graphics card, and pci slots... allowing direct access means that the computer can be taking care of more things at the same time, combine this with the fact that the bus architecture is already really efficient, and it seems like performance should be stellar....



i don't really think its any worse a solution than the wintel worlds. when they have ACTUAL 533mhz buses, it might be a concern, but for now, their just different engineering strategies... furthermore, wintel's real need to do this is cuz they clock the processors so high, they need to keep realistic bus multipliers or whatever....



correct me if i'm wrong, my knowledge is not highly technical... but i think i've made some sense out of it...