Reports Archive

The report below is available from the Inquest Reports Archive.  Please send email to info@inqst.com for more information.

PC Platform Technologies

Table of Contents, Introduction and Order Form

Across the entire PC platform, nearly every key technology is in a state of accelerating transition. New bus interfaces, integration opportunities, price/performance requirements, new market segments, technology initiatives, new features and capabilities, new competitors and new market windows will emerge and advance at a blindingly fast pace.

The battle zone encompasses topics such as DRAM interface standards, CPU interfaces and architectures, bus speeds, AGP utilization, bandwidth arbitration, AGP operating modes, performance requirements, cache architectures, bus pipelining, graphics integration, DRAM integration and CPU integration.

In the public forum, these issues are being hotly debated on a largely rhetorical basis, driven by a confusing and inconsistent "sound bite" analysis.

Through a comprehensive treatment of the inter-relationship of all system performance issues and integration strategies, this report will help its readers to reach consistent and comprehensive conclusions suited to their business model.

A system bandwidth and performance modeling technique is used to evaluate the impact of future memory interfaces, CPU bus types and speeds, and AGP loads. The model simulates CPU performance efficiency, plus system bandwidth and latency from the CPU core through the caches and main memory to AGP.

Aimed at the PC related marketing and technology manager, this 184 page report addresses in a comprehensive and consistent manner, the full scope of technical and marketing issues facing vendors and consumers of PC platform technologies and products.