You’ve no doubt heard of Intel’s Common System Interface by now. This is Intel’s shot at moving its own architectures away from the frontside bus in the way that AMD did with HyperTransport.
The Reg is reporting the work of analyst David Kanter at Real World Technologies who has dug through patents and interviewed engineers to put together a detailed report on what he thinks CSI will look like. We won’t get to hear Intel’s plans for its technology until the IDF next month.
A taste from Kanter’s report
Unlike the front-side bus, CSI is a cleanly defined, layered network fabric used to communicate between various agents. These “agents” may be microprocessors, coprocessors, FPGAs, chipsets, or generally any device with a CSI port….Initial CSI implementations in Intel’s 65nm and 45nm high performance CMOS processes target 4.8-6.4GT/s operation, thus providing 12-16GB/s of bandwidth in each direction and 24-32GB/s for each link.