Main -> Wish list -> Specialised "general purpose" processors
Specialised "general purpose" processors
High processing power of newest systems has shown that a traditional approach to specialised processors (mainly RAID and graphics) is becoming the bottleneck. This is already understood by Intel, but not to the full extent. The two solutions (Intel's Jasper Forest and Intel backed Licid Hydra) now presented to the public are really palliatives - more market tests than the real solution.
Let's consider Jasper Forest first - the maximum bandwidth between the server appliance based on it and the workstation is limited by x8 PCIe link (4GB/s) - in reality not much more than existing SAS 6G controllers. Yes, it would be a bit faster in IOPS and total throughput, but only a bit. But really the solution may be much faster - if the chip is connected to the main system by the QPI link and have at least 24 PCIe lanes - this will allow to have up to 10-11 GB/s throughput and really high IOPS between the main system and the storage and will allow the long-awaited solutions for bandwidth-hungry applications (most workstation apps are) with a specialised RAID processor on-board.
Same goes for Licid Hydra - not a bad idea by itself, but not really as powerful as needed - a specialised Nehalem-based processor will do the job faster and will be able to support much more grapics nods - with soon-to-come Intel Larrabee the solution may become a killing one for multi-system rendering farms (with slightly modified (non-symmetrical) AMD and nVidia solutions too).
By the way, though AMD processors are still somewhat inferior to Intel ones, the AMD may also get not a bad productivity jump using HT 3.0 interconnect between general purpose and specialised Opterons.