BAD HARDWARE WEEK

"IO," said one manager of a major datacentre, is the great big bottleneck. He said that AMD blades performed better by between 10 and 50 per cent in his corporation, and he'd asked Intel over and over again when it would deliver this kind of throughput. If it can't produce chipsets, who can, he asked.

Badhardware has warned people on this dark side of Intel's hardware (AMD's Opteron is immune to this thanks to HT). And the obvious congestion cause at Intel is prehistoric FSB customized for single processor personal computer:

QPI vs. FSB
	Intel FSB(Front Side Bus)	Intel QuickPath Interconnect(QPI)
Topology	Shared Bus	Point to Point Link
Physical Bus Width(bits)	64	20
Data Transfer Width(bits)	64	16
Requires Side-band Signals	Yes	No
Total Number of Pins	150	84
Clock Per Bus	1	1
Embedded Clock	No	No
Bus Direction	Bi-directional	Uni-directional

We will wait *WWW) almost the whole year to see QPI and Nehalem delivered by Intel. However, being B3 BArcelona revision is ready now, AMD delivers it . Is delivering NOW.