Patent ID: 7617348

Claim:
An apparatus to provide card-to-card communication in a computing system, comprising: a bus interface controller to manage a set of serial data lanes; and said bus interface controller having a first mode of operation in which said set of serial data lanes is managed as a full bus and a second mode of operation in which a first subset of said serial data lanes is managed as a first bus and a second subset of said serial data lanes is managed as a second bus; the first bus coupling a first graphics processing unit (GPU) to a second GPU via a first data pathway including an intervening chipset with the second bus serving as a private bus providing a second data pathway that is a direct data pathway between the first and second GPUs; wherein in said second mode of operation said bus interface controller accounts for differences in data latency between said first data pathway and said second data pathway by performing data reordering for data requiring a semantic order.