December 7, 1999 2:49pm
Intel invests again to promote new
I/O architecture
By Sonia R. Lelii PC Week
Intel Corp. plans to invest nearly $15 million in Ancor
Communications Inc. to develop switches that support
the next-generation InfiniBand I/O architecture.
It's the latest round of financing that Intel has made to
promote the new I/O interconnect standard. Several
months ago, the Santa Clara, Calif., company invested
some $6 million in Crossroads Systems Inc. of Austin,
Texas, which makes routers.
Today's announcement comes just weeks before the
first draft of the InfiniBand architecture is expected for
public release. Ancor, of Eden Prairie, Minn., is
expected to bring InfiniBand switches to market by
2001.
Industry observers say the InfiniBand spec is moving
forward at a steady pace, despite the rocky start that
surrounded the new architecture almost a year ago. At
the time, Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co
and IBM split from Intel Corp. on how to move toward a
new switched-fabric interconnect. The two groups
reconciled last summer, and since then the InfiniBand
Trade Association has been working to merge what had
been two sets of I/O specifications.
Merging the specs
Compaq., IBM, Dell Computer Corp. and HP are
expected to release products supporting InfiniBand
around 2001 and 2002. Some observers have
expressed concern, though, that merging the specs
would not be seamless since the two camps were
developing standards based on different approaches.
Ancor officials say divergence shouldn't be a problem in
building products because the first draft of InfiniBand
will contain enough fundamentals for the new I/O
design.
"We pretty much know the basic design," said Rob
Davis, Ancor's vice president of advanced product
planning. "But there is always a lot of tweaking that
goes on [in the beginning] as people find errors in
logic."
According to Bob Livolsi, senior vice president of sales
and marketing at Crossroads, the two camps hadn't
done all that much in developing separate standards.
"The specifications were there but the work on the
products had not gone that far," said Livolsi. "We were
looking at both specs very hard. We knew we had to
stay in both camps, so the compromise was great for
us." |
