Group Approves New PCI Bus That Doubles Throughput
techweb.com
>>Servers and high-powered workstations are about to get a big bandwidth boost. The PCI Special Interest Group (SIG), which manages the PCI specification, has approved a new PCI bus that doubles throughput. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq-normally competitors in the PC server market-developed the new bus, dubbed PCI-X, last year.
>>The faster bus was designed for high-speed I/O devices, such as Gigabit Ethernet cards, Ultra3 SCSI and Fibre Channel....
>>PCI-X is not likely to be found in cheaper, low-end machines for some time, since it adds to the cost of the motherboard. Currently, PCI supports one 64-bit bus running at 66MHz, while the rest run at 32 bits or 64 bits at 33MHz. Maximum throughput for a system is 532MBps. PCI-X doubles all of that, cranking up one bus to 133MHz at 64 bits and the rest of the buses to 66MHz at 64 bits for a maximum throughput of 1.06GBps. It will initially be used in servers and workstations, since they need all the throughput they can get.
>>To receive the benefit of the high-speed bus, vendors will have to create their own PCI-X cards that run at the higher speed. Adaptec, 3Com and LSI Logic have all signed on to support the new bus. Both PCI and PCI-X buses and cards will be backward compatible, according to Richard Baek, executive director of the SIG. A PCI card will work in a PCI-X slot, and any PCI-X card placed in a standard PCI slot will automatically step down its speed to run at 33MHz.
>>The SIG expects its membership to approve the spec by the third quarter and for products to begin appearing six to nine months after that. Expect a number of PCI-X-based systems to be announced at Comdex in November, according to Baek.<< |
