Paul, thanks for the article on " ...LSI) announced
that its family of GigaBlaze(R) gigabit per second CMOS transceiver cores
support the physical requirements of the "Next Generation I/O" (NGIO)
architecture, a new input/output initiative proposed by Intel to enable new levels
of scalability and reliability for mission critical server platforms."
NGIO, besides enabling new levels of scalability and reliability for mission critical server platforms will also do something much more basic: increase the I/O bandwidth that Intel's upcoming next generation servers will be able to handle. This means being able to connect many more and faster I/O subsystems, like RAID storage, than can be accommodated today. Further describing the evolution, it will help enable future Intel servers to move up a lot in the food chain and compete with medium to large scale servers like Sun E series class, and even mainframes. This means a lot more business for anyone getting product designed into the basic Intel server node. Hopefully, in this case, LSI.
What's in it for LSI Logic? Well, I'd personally much rather see them hang on the coat-tails of Intel, and Intel's server customers like Dell, Compaq, IBM and HP, than on those of the fickle game, camera, or whatever other toy thing companies they've been hanging around with. Besides being a fickle market, I think the margins on those chips must be razor thin. Of course, the volumes are much larger for the "toy" chips. Have to leave it up to LSI to decide where to put the resources here.
Another piece of news is that Symbios continues be the SCSI chip(s) controller of choice for Intel's current most powerful Xeon based servers, which have had all problems ironed out. It came out this week that Intel is sold out of the Xeon chips that go into these servers well into next year. I don't know how much business that means for LSI/Symbios, but it's got to be more than they anticipated, and in a highly visible and important product in the IT industry.
developer.intel.com
Tony |
