Silicon rush to Infiniband commences
By Jerry Ascierto
EE Times
(10/24/00, 10:17 a.m. EST)
eet.com
SAN MATEO, Calif. — When the Infiniband Trade
Association releases its 1.0 spec on Tuesday (Oct. 24),
both startups and entrenched silicon vendors will begin to
jockey for position in this emerging field.
The release of the spec at the first Infiniband Developers
Conference is expected to fundamentally alter the server
market landscape, breeding the rise of advanced server
clustering over monolithic, big iron machines.
"Initially, the killer app for Infiniband is server clustering,"
said Phill Grove, vice president of marketing for startup
Banderacom Inc. (Austin, Texas), whose introduction of
Infiniband silicon is imminent. "So Intel and Sun have
already introduced their chip set road map going forward,
and this is creating a market for Infiniband early on. And
we're seeing a flurry of activity."
In addition to kicking off its flagship iBandit Infiniband
architecture at the conference, Banderacom will announce a partnership with
software maker Wind River Systems Inc. (Alameda, Calif.). The two companies
will work together to develop Infiniband transport software for Wind River's
VxWorks and IxWorks RTOS, software charged with controlling semiconductor
chip sets within Infiniband channel adapter devices.
Make or break
Analysts believe that although the Infiniband spec will produce a rush of silicon,
software execution will be just as critical. As the server-farm model begins to
take further shape, it's the clustering software that will make or break it.
"The clustering software will become vastly more important" in the wake of the
Infiniband spec rollout, said Jonathan Eunice, president of market research firm
Illuminata Inc. "OEMs, or people like Microsoft who own their own cluster smarts
— including Compaq, who has a long technology history with it — will have a real
leg up."
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) will roll out a 2.5-Gbit/second
Physical Layer Transceiver for Infiniband networking systems. Compatible with
optical modules, copper cables and printed circuit boards, the single-chip
CY7B926V integrates a 2.5-Gbit/s transmitter, receiver, clock and data recovery
circuit, serdes and 8B/10B encoder-decoder. Samples and evaluation boards will
be available in the fourth quarter, with production volumes scheduled to ship early
in the first quarter of 2001, priced at $95 each in quantities of 1,000.
Also at the Infiniband conference, QuickLogic Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) will
announce a licensing agreement with Conexant Systems Inc. (Newport Beach,
Calif.) to address the burgeoning Infiniband market. QuickLogic will be integrating
Conexant's 3.125-Gbit/s Skyrail serial transceiver technology into its
next-generation QuickSD Embedded Standard Product family. Quicklogic is bent
on increasing the aggregate data throughput of the QuickSD family, which is
aimed at routers, 3G basestations, storage-area networks and other
communications and storage equipment.
The company's as-yet-unnamed product will combine 3.125-Gbit/s scalable
transceivers (including clock and data recovery capability) with customizable
logic, dual-port SRAM, embedded multiply and accumulate computational blocks
and programmable I/Os. In addition to Infiniband compliance, Skyrail also
supports Fibre Channel, Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet standards.
"The Infiniband spec allows, as most standards of these types do, for a number of
different physical extenuations," said Gordon Haff, research director for Intel
Architectures at the Aberdeen Group. "It's very much complimentary to PCI, and
will coexist with Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, PCI and PCI-X." |
