Intel to start using integrated memory controllers

[Mini D]

It's interesting to sit and watch the company I've worked for for 14 years finally start making some good decisions. The decision to stop pushing GHz as the standard and focus on power consumption and performance was contrary to 7 years of GHz doctrine. The latest decision is a little more of an "in your face" reversal of policy, but it should be every bit the benifit.

I was thinking about the implications and wondered if anyone else had some thoughts on it before I shared my views on the potential impacts.

[Pudgie]

Hi Mini-D,

I'll go 1st.

I think that Intel finally got it's ego deflated some by AMD in this area & realized that this is the better route to take--& the market proved AMD to be right. This was a hard thing for Intel to swallow as pride can cripple a company's ability to "see" newer innovative technologies on the horizon as well as the "David's ability to compete w/ Goliath" syndrome in that AMD (or anyone else) didn't have the savvy & capable people to go head-to-head w/ Intel so it would be safe to assume that what we (Intel) see as the best methodology to improve performance has to be the way forward---NOT!    

This is certainly not a bad thing in any stretch of the imagination. In fact, IMHO this is probably 1 of the best breakthru's in the industry--true parity. Now get ready for some of the best innovation to show up in years! Across all platforms!

Now as for the implications concerning the use of integrated memory controllers you'll have to explain that 1.

Since Macs have been doing this for years & AMD proved that this will work in a PC platform, so what would be the problems w/ Intel incorporating this technology in it's line of chips, if any?

[Skuzzy]

I see good and bad about this.  I was hoping to see multiple paths to memory using multiple memory controllers.  Building the memory controller into the CPU kills that.

What happens to the motherboard designs which do incorporate multiple memory paths so multiple CPU;s can access memory (read) simulatanesouly or read/write to different regions of RAM simultaneously?  Granted, these are server motherboards, but that is a huge performance benefit.

I am sure it will reduce costs, but I really hope Intel leaves the memory controller external for the higher end CPU family.

For a single CPU I can see the benefit, but for multi-core or multi-CPU systems it takes a big performance boost away from the system.  Unless Intel plans on incorporating multiple memory buses along with this.  I really do not see that happening due to pin count.

Unless the memory bus is going serial?
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Overall I do not like it.  It kills the flexibility of pairing different memory controllers with CPU's to work well in different implementations.

EDIT:  As a side note,  I have watched over the years as OEM's have bled the industry dry of performance oriented solutions in favor of cutting costs.  So this comes as no surprise to me.  I cannot blame Intel for this move at all.

[Mini D]

I do not believe this is a cost cutting measure. Everything I've read indicates it was done as a performance enhancement. I just can't believe we bit the bullet and did it.

I do not believe this is particularly good news for AMD. The IMC was one of their last stand-out features. I do believe this is going to be a very interesting year for AMD. I hope they can weather the storm.

I also wonder what impact this will have on "the virtual machine" concept. With multiple core CPUs, I see this as the next great leap in functionality. I don't know why I'd ever need to run LINUX and Windows simultaneously, but it'd be cool to try.