Paul, >ITanium Chip Sets - and FOSTER Chip Sets - are discussed at length in this article.
Clearly, the multi-vendor Chip Set designs is going result in some interesting systems and competition.
Further - the increasing number of articles on IA 64 hardware and software seems to indicate that the ITaniumn launch is rapidly approaching.
Great article. A lot of jewels in there. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. A piece of that article can serve to put to rest, for now, the question that keeps coming up: whether Intel ships, or intends to ship their own servers.
"We're growing away from being the chipheads we were," said Mike Fister, vice president of the enterprise server group at Intel. "We build and sell (servers) at multiple levels of integration. To some we sell 'white box' systems," the generic computers that lack only a brand label.
This has been the case since the Pentium Pro days.
Compaq is building a chipset called the F8 that will enable 8-CPU Foster servers. "We're really excited about Foster," Santeler said. The chip comes with 10 parallel memory controllers to ensure that the CPUs can communicate with memory fast enough, he said.
Sounds like an alternative to NUMA.
IBM has announced it's making InfiniBand chips. Though the technology will arrive in time for the McKinley chip in the second half of 2001, "there are people targeting earlier processors," said Jim Bowers, architecture marketing manager at IBM.
InfiniBand's obvious use is to plug devices such as network cards and hard disk controllers into a computer. But the more powerful use in all likelihood will be joining processors into clusters that can work cooperatively or take over from each other when one fails, analysts say.
Bowers said InfiniBand will be used across a vast spectrum of Intel servers, costing anywhere from $2,000 to $250,000, though it first will show up in midrange systems.
Nice to have an IBM guy make a future trends statement that's so positive for Intel like that.
Tony
Edit, here's the InfiniBandSM Trade Association's website. I see from Events at that site that this one is coming up:
Intel Developer Forum Conference, Fall 2000
Date: August 22-24, 2000
Location: San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, California
infinibandta.org |
