RWT: An Updated Look at Intel's Quick Path Interconnect

Thursday 21st July 2011, 12:00:00 AM, written by Alex G

Our friendly neighbourhood CPU guru, David Kanter at RealWorldTech, has a look at Intel's QPI in Sandy Bridge and thoughts for future development.

To adjust to changes in the industry and system architecture, Intel has announced a second generation Quick Path Interconnect 1.1. This new version is backwards compatible with existing QPI interfaces, which are now collectively referred to as QPI 1.0. All current x86 and IPF platforms use QPI 1.0 – including Nehalem-EP/EX, Westmere-EP/EX and Tukwila. QPI 1.1 further unifies the x86 and IPF flavors, so that Itanium can re-use and benefit more from the tremendous investments in x86 system architecture. The goal for the next generation QPI is higher performance, better efficiency and reliability. To that end, QPI 1.1 has numerous improvements at the electrical, logical and protocol levels. Sandy Bridge-EP and the Romley platform will be the first products to use QPI 1.1, followed by Ivy Bridge-EP/EX, and it is possible that Poulson will follow suit.

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