Intel attempts to sideswipe AMD Torrenza with Geneseo

Intel is attempting to draw attention away from AMD's Torrenza initiative with a new architecture codenamed Geneseo.

Torrenza, as we reported last week, is AMD's plan to license its socket and HyperTransport technology. It will see motherboards with dual processor sockets, allowing users to plug an AMD processor into one socket and a co-processor into another, to allow for physics, maths or graphics processing. The two (or more) chips communicate via HyperTransport.

Well, Intel has created a new, open standard which is based on PCI Express. It will allow those designing application specific co-processors to hook directly in to the front side bus and the processor using PCI-E. It is a direct competitor to Torrenza, but Intel believes that it will be more popular, since it is based on the open PCI-E standard.

Those signed up to the initiative include IBM and, interestingly, NVIDIA and AGEIA - will we see GeForce GPUs and PhysX PPUs in processor-like packages, rather than the cards that we have become accustomed to? It seems like this will be the case.

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