Intel Opens Its Front-Side Bus

vivin writes "The Inquirer is reporting that Intel has opened up its FSB. Intel did this during IDF 07. What this means is that you can plug non-Intel things into the Intel CPU socket. The article says 'This shows that Intel is willing to take AMD seriously as a competitive threat, and is prepared to act upon it. In addition to this breaking one of the most sacred taboos at Intel, it also hints that engineering now has the upper hand over bureaucracy.'"

Not the first time

[LiquidCoooled]

This isn't the first time socket sharing has occured

The old Socket 7 [wikipedia.org] used to fit Intel and AMD and Cyrix.
Hell, it can even house socket 5 cpus!

Back then it wasn't a big deal to upgrade a CPU.

All the companies started changing sockets at a frantic pace and made a simple CPU update essentially mean a whole machine.

A new motherboard for the new socket but it also has new memory footprint as well so that gets replaced, and the PCIx slot won't fit my agp card.

Does this really make sense?

[BenJeremy]

>> 'This shows that Intel is willing to take AMD seriously as a competitive threat, and is prepared to act upon it.'

I'm not sure how much sense this statement really makes. If they take AMD as a serious threat, wouldn't they WANT AMD to be forced to continue using their own bus? AM2 was probably a misstep, given the performance drops, giving intel the upper hand, but now they are willing to let AMD play in their sandbox - it helps AMD more than it hurts them.

I'm not complaining about the move, I just found the article a bit sparse on details and the statement at odds with common sense. Is it fully open, or does it require licensing? What is AMD's take on this news? How much re-work will be required to move AMD's processor cores to the intel bus? Will they gain performance or lose it in the translation?

Lots of questions that the Inquirer seems to totally ignore in what may be a significant development in the battle of the big boys.

didn't it used to be this way?

[jack455]

Back in the late 80's or early 90's couldn't you swap out processor's? I admit I didn't know much back then but I thought that was how AMD and Cyrix got started, on boards meant for Intel CPU's.

And by CPU, I DON'T mean the case and everything inside :)

For the motherborad section?

[dfenstrate]

I've bought Intel motherboards (and of course processors) for my last three computers, and they've been pretty rock solid.

Perhaps they think it wise to sell products that can be used even if their competitor gets a few bucks- until today didn't they effectively yield the floor for AMD motherboards to other companies?

Re:wow (not?)

[kadat]

I can't see why would AMD want to use Intel's FSB when they have their own. Just for sake of users who can't switch CPUs in their motherboards as they wish? There are as many pros as cons in this situation - user can switch from Intel to AMD but she can also switch the other way around. I'm not familiar with this market and tech involved but it doesn't really sound like a big "WOW" for me.

But it sure is good. It may encourage others to make CPUs without the need to develop their own chipsets, FSBs, motherboards and therefore will bring more competition to the market. ATM we only have two players on the field, right? At least players that matter.

Re:Couldn't there be some sort of trap here?

[tomstdenis]

Hypertransport is an open protocol. People would rather design hardware for HT then the Intel FSB from what I can tell (given there is already one FPGA accelerator for 939-pin sockets).

But that raises the same point. The open socket could be used for something other than a processor. Like another FPGA accelerator.

Tom

Re:Microsoft should likewise open up Windows 98SE

[FudRucker]

Win98se was a decent OS despite the vulnerabilities, it was the last Windows release i actually enjoyed using & tweaking, i have since started using Linux exclusively and don't even have windows installed on my PCs, i bet if Win98se was opened sourced it could be made to accept more RAM than 512 & run on faster CPUs/FSBs/ & etc...

Open98

this is was coolest tool to strip down Win98 with, WARNING: applications that depend on internet explorer will break! http://snoopy81.ifrance.com/rom2.htm [ifrance.com]

FPGAs, anyone?

[labreuer]

This opening of the front side bus also means that you'll be able to plug FPGAs into it [embedded.com], which could be very cool. One way to solve the gigahertz slowdown is to specialize hardware: think co-processor that can be reconfigured in seconds to fit the particular task at hand, like video encoding.

nVidia users HT in Intel chipsets

[saikou]

Just FYI, nForce 860i SLI for LGA775 uses HyperTransport Link between north and south bridge. So, essentially you have Intel system that uses AMD HT bus :)