A brief look at Intel's new Common Systems Interconnect (CSI)
 

Back in January of 2006, I wrote a short article called "Intel has a major '06-'07 weak spot, and AMD is aiming right at it." That "weak spot" was, of course, Intel's aging shared bus architecture, which was then poised to drag down the company's superior processor architecture and leave AMD's Opteron + HyperTransport combination at the top of the multisocket server heap.

Well, here we are in 2007, and it has happened just like that. In a new whitepaper on Common Systems Interconnect (CSI), Intel's forthcoming answer to HyperTransport, David Kanter gives the following bit of retrospective on what is now recent history: "Intel’s platform shortcomings created a weakness that AMD exploited to gain significant market share. It is estimated that Intel currently holds as little as 50% of the market for MP servers, compared to roughly 75-80% of the overall market."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...nnect-csi.html

Intel is projected to move away from FB-DIMMs now? I thought that was just speculation. Would be a smart idea if they would....

If Intel designed the CSI bus to be easily ported from a copper to a optical based system, then I take it they plan to be using CSI for at least as long as the FSB...