system agent

On a sunny day (Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:17:44 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

That sounds a bit of a copycat of Cell's EIB (Element Interconnect Bus). Cell processor as used in the PS3. The EIB is also a circular ring architecture, wit heverythin gconnected to it, it also has an arbiter.

The CPUs only communicate over the ring, and apparently can't do I/O. There seem to be two top-level control structures, the "system agent" and the "embedded controller."

It could be that Intel has concluded that anybody can make and sell cheap multicore CPUs, but the current security situation is untenable, and that's where the real money is. So the CPUs and their miserable legacy OSs must be brutally sandboxed by hardware, sort of a hard VMware concept.

Hence the McAfee purchase. They wouldn't spend eight gigabucks just to be in the anti-virus business.

If that's waht's happening, expect a flood of patents.

John