Chip Makers to Demonstrate InfiniBand,
Standard Aimed at Breaking Data Logjam
By MOLLY WILLIAMS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A slew of companies are about to present solutions to a mounting problem inside server and network computers: While ever-faster microprocessors are hitting the market, the ability of these "brain" chips to communicate with other components, as well as with the outside world, hasn't kept pace.
The latest illustration of the problem will come next week when Intel Corp. introduces its newest Pentium 4 chip. It will run at speeds of as much as 2 gigahertz, up from the Pentium's previous top speed of 1.8 gigahertz. But the path that carries data to and from the microprocessor is much slower than the processor, so it can't take full advantage of the chip's high speed. As a result, while the chip is serving up an ocean of data, the path that the data flows on "is a drinking straw," says Vernon Turner, an analyst at IDC Corp., a technology research firm based in Framingham, Mass.
Intel Will Cut Chip Prices up to 54%, Accelerate Push for Faster Processors (Aug. 22)
To dissolve the bottleneck in corporate networks, several small chip makers, with funding from Intel, have been working on chips that use a new standard called InfiniBand to increase the speed of data moving from the processor to computer networks to as much as 10 gigabits per second.
A number of the chip makers, along with Intel, plan to demonstrate products using the standard at a conference in San Jose, Calif., next week.
InfiniBand came about after two competing factions in the computer industry agreed to combine their work on how to speed data going into and out of microprocessors. Intel and others had been working on a standard since 1998. International Business Machines Corp. and other system makers had started work on a separate standard. But the two sides came together in August 1999 and later named the unified standard InfiniBand.
Today, Intel, IBM, Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. are working together on the standard.
InfiniBand is like a fabric in which each thread can move data, instead of data moving on just a single strand, as in current technology. Among the small closely held companies making chips using the InfiniBand standard are Mellanox Technologies Inc., Primarion Inc. and Banderacom Inc. Working at these concerns are some heavyweights in microprocessor design.
Bill Pohlman, who is a co-founder of Primarion, was a key designer at Intel. Les Crudele, chief executive officer of Banderacom, was a designer of the PowerPC microprocessor while he was at Motorola Inc. And Eyal Waldman, CEO of Israel's Mellanox, also worked at Intel as a chip designer and co-founded chip maker Galileo Technology Ltd. Also, Intel, too, is making InfiniBand products.
The market for InfiniBand chips is expected to grow to 4.2 million units in 2004, and by 2005 more than 80% of servers shipped will be InfiniBand enabled, according to IDC Corp.
Companies working on InfiniBand products are working in three areas: hosts, targets and switches. The hosts are the microprocessors. Target chips sit in the storage system or corporate networks that are powered by the servers. Switch chips sit inside the networking gear that helps route data around and between networks and servers.
Eventually this technology may trickle down to the personal computer, and could let users scan a photo or a document in seconds. Mr. Waldman says that is probably five or six years away.
But there may be another standards battle brewing here, as Intel is working on an input/output technology, called Arapahoe, or 3GIO, that will be for PCs. Intel said it will disclose more on its plans for 3GIO next week as well.
Write to Molly Williams at molly.williams@wsj.com |
