Spring IDF: Intel Geneseo details
Wednesday 18th April 2007, 03:11:00 PM, written by Arun
A number of websites, including Hexus and Digitimes, are now reporting the details on Intel's Geneseo that were revealed earlier at IDF. Of particular interest is that it will be fully compatible with "existing PCI architecture and infrastructure" and that "booting processes for existing operating systems will also remain unchanged."
Geneseo is an extension to PCI Express being proposed by Intel and IBM, and aimed at hosting a variety of co-processors. As such, the importance of these statements should not be understated as compatiblity (which, we believe, was not previously mentioned) would make it a a very logical replacement for PCIe 2.0. and thus give it a significant advantage over AMD's Torrenza, which is based on HyperTransport and thus very unlikely to ever be adopted on Intel platforms. Unlike Torrenza, however, it does not guarantee cache coherence.
It remains to be seen, of course, exactly what being "fully compatible" really means. Full backwards and forward compatibility (as long as the specific product is designed around that), as is the case with PCI Express 2.0., would imply that Geneseo is very likely to become mainstream and be adopted by both NVIDIA and ATI, as well as more specialized co-processor vendors. Interestingly, it might even become a positive development for the GPGPU industry.
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