<font color=red>Gary and others, here's a summary of Sean Maloney's Keynote from IDF.
- Current view of the Telecom industry: Headcount and Research dollars have approximately been halved from their peaks.
- Stresses a need for a "modular" approach to this market. Need to reduce costs, and make things standardized. Need to meet the challenges of an exponentially growing market (shows data of Petabytes of Internet traffic per month continuing to grow at an exponential rate through 2000 and 2001).
- Communications R&D from Intel is many times that of the other powers in this market.
- Must resist the urge for Hypersegmentation - that will only confuse and slow down migration of technology.
- Intel launches three new networking chips to aid in the transition to single-chip Gigabit ethernet - the 82546 dual port GbE for servers, the 82545 single port GbE for servers and workstations, and 82540 client based GbE chip.
- Demonstration includes Intel 82546 based card based on 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X. Most servers have two ethernet connections, and this card includes two ports using a single inexpensive chip. Each port dissipates only 1.5W.
- Client based 82540 fits into the same space-saving 15x15 footprint as Intel's previous 10/100 based ethernet controller. Power on this board is 2W/channel.
- Demonstration includes 8 clients feeding into a single server. The server contains a 10/100 switch, but the clients contain 82540 based GbE. The demonstration shows the kind of performance one can expect by upgrading the server to GbE.
- With the 10/100 switch, the server CPU utilization is only at 10%, and the clients are being held back waiting for data. A gigabit switch is substituted for one port, and the network traffic to the clients increases to 1100MB/s from 200mb/s. Once the second port is transferred to the gigabit port, the network traffic reaches nearly 100% utilization at 2GB/s.
- Next, talks about 802.11, and Sean says that there is no doubt that this technology has won the battle for wireless standards. It is being used or pursued in nearly every industry - so much so that Sean considers it in the "Irrational Exuberance" stage. There is a lot of work yet to be done before it is a viable technology.
- There is a security challenge involved. Intel recommends VPN as the superior security solution right now. Later this year and next, Intel is pursuing TKIP and AES through IEEE (FYI, they plan to get it there ASAP :o).
- Legitimate objections to the standards in Europe need to be addressed as well. Need to come up with a Global Standard.
- The Post-Recession Technology will be: A dual band 802.11a and b.
- Demonstration includes a laptop with ethernet and 802.11b access card. Streaming video and live webcam is recording the demo, both connected via ethernet. The ethernet connection is unplugged, but the networking continues, after having switched over to the 802.11b wireless network. Later, the laptop is plugged back into the ethernet connection, and the ethernet connection is restored, all without interrupting the video and webcam.
- Optical needs for speed - 10Gb ethernet. This is crucial for Internet infrastructure, and highly integrated modular parts will allow the costs to be feasible.
- Three main market segments - "Long Haul" reaching out over 100s of kilometers, "Metro" in the range of 10s of kilometers, and "Enterprise" in the range of 2 or fewer kilometers. Cost, power, and port density varies greatly between these markets, and so do the challenges.
- Package design is one challenge, as tolerance for smaller package becomes lower as one moves to the Enterprise optical segment.
- Some interesting slides follow in terms of technologies for these optical segments. The theme was that different segments have different technologies to optimize around.
While this keynote didn't have the same exciting product launches or demonstrations as the other keynotes, it's clear that Intel has a good vision in terms of furthering the networking and communications market. It's been a tough six months for the industry, as Sean points out in the beginning, but Intel may have what it needs to be on top once the market picks up again.
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