3 ms·
Interesting that a MAC was moved on-chip, but it's only Gigabit and only one channel. Sounds to me more like a BOM reduction aimed at workstations and low-end s
by dom0 10y ago
Interesting that a MAC was moved on-chip, but it's only Gigabit and only one channel. Sounds to me more like a BOM reduction aimed at workstations and low-end servers that don't need much network bandwidth rather than being inteded for heavy duty use (since even the Intel C2000 have 4x 1/2.5 GbE MACs).
> The neat bit is that activating the GPU on one of these Xeon E3 processors only adds a single watt to the thermal profile of the chip and only a few bucks to the cost.
Well I very much doubt that in practice. Perhaps Intel's TDP scenario here is "no outputs connected and no framebuffer active" or something like that.
- wmf 10y agoIntel's PCH has had an Ethernet MAC for years but no one seems to use it. The GPU can steal power from the CPU cores and force them to throttle, which may explain the TDP.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThe article got the ethernet situation pretty much completely wrong. The MAC is on the PCH, not on the CPU die. It's not even new, either, dating back to the C200 chipsets of the Sandy Bridge era.