This seems to be the final confirmation of the full PCI-sig, approving the committee recommendation.
Intel scores PC-redesign victory
Industry group approves plan to rework computer innards
By Stephen Shankland
CNET NEWS.COM
Aug. 3 — In a win for Intel, a key industry group has voted in favor of the chipmaker’s proposal to rework the innards of computers and a who’s who of industry heavy hitters has joined to promote the technology, CNET News.com has learned.
THE PROPOSED TECHNOLOGY, called 3GIO, will now be overseen by the PCI-SIG, the standards body that supervises Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), the dominant technique for plugging devices into computers.
The PCI-SIG steering committee unanimously approved 3GIO Friday morning, said Tom Bradicich, director of architecture and technology at IBM, and one of the voters.
A spokeswoman for the PCI-SIG confirmed that the group voted in favor of the 3GIO proposal.
The lead companies in charge of the specification—the “promoters,” in industry standard jargon—will be Intel, IBM, Compaq Computer, Microsoft and Dell Computer, Bradicich said.
PCI has enjoyed a long reign as the prevailing way to transfer data into and out of a computer, but speeding up the technology is becoming prohibitively expensive.
PCI sends synchronized signals along numerous parallel wires, but 3GIO uses many fewer wires that can transfer data at higher speeds because signals don’t have to be synchronized.
PCI-SIG’s involvement in backing the Intel specification was first reported by CNET News.com.
Analysts had said a different standard—from Intel rival AMD—called HyperTransport had the potential to split the industry, but AMD didn’t position HyperTransport as a 3GIO competitor.
A representative confirmed Friday that AMD voted in favor of 3GIO becoming a PCI-SIG standard.
3GIO has been governed by a more secretive organization called the Arapahoe Working Group. “We have decided that bringing this to the PCI-SIG body was a better idea than going it alone with yet another special interest group,” Bradicich said.
Copyright © 1995-2001 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved
(linc may not work so I copied the art)
msnbc.com
stacks.msnbc.com |
