Chapter 17. Hewlett-Packard's Scalable Processor Chipset
“Whatever computer you can build, people will take advantage of that situation...you can envision a system that's far more intelligent. It could be far more intelligent about everything. It could do all sorts of pattern matching about your last accesses and really understand so that you could ask queries against it. All sorts of great things that can come from millions more [CPU] cycles.”
—Jerry Huck
In This Chapter:
The 64-bit world is rapidly changing by pushing the boundaries of price and performance unexpectedly far. Once the exclusive preserve of proprietary, high-margin RISC architectures, 64-bit processing is finally becoming pervasive across the technical and enterprise space. Part of this shift is that commoditization of 64-bit processors and the architectures that are built around them are very close indeed.
The HP zx1 Chipset is priced like a commodity part, but it has all the benefits of a chipset designed to meet the rigorous requirements of the enterprise. It leverages high performance but economically priced DDR SDRAM (Double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory) for additional cost savings. This promises to revolutionize the IT world by being both fast and ubiquitous. It also sets the stage for this chipset becoming the next standard in computing power.