Paul, from the article about PCI-X coming into play and IBM Enterprise X Architecture servers:
The emergence of fast I/O links is helping systems designers drive PC architectures deeper into corporate and Internet data centers. At Comdex, IBM detailed its plans for its Enterprise X Architecture, a set of scalable Intel-based servers that can be configured with as many as 16 processors, 256 Gbytes of RAM and 48 PCI-X I/O slots.
The new IBM systems will come in versions for Intel 32-bit Foster and 64-bit McKinley processors, simply by swapping out a processor interface chip. The servers leverage what IBM describes as mainframe-class capabilities, including hot-swap memory, up to 64 Mbytes of Level-4 cache and a 3.2-Gbyte/s coherent scalability port for linking multiple processors, even across separate chassis.
These are pretty serious specs for 32 bit servers: L4 cache, 256 GB of memory, 48 PCI-X slots. Maybe IBM expects most to sell as, or upgrade to McKinley (Pretty easy upgradability between IA32 and IA64 being made possible by IBM here, at least in the hardware).
The new IBM systems will come in versions for Intel 32-bit Foster and 64-bit McKinley processors, simply by swapping out a processor interface chip.
Tony |
