Motorola Serves Up Router On A Chip
Received: September 25, 1997 06:23am EDT From: Inter@ctive Week
From Inter@ctive Week for September 22, 1997 by Joe McGarvey
Aimed at decreasing the cost of remote access equipment, Motorola Inc.
today introduced a computer chip capable of handling all the data
delivery duties of a remote access router.
The MPC860T, essentially a router on a chip, is designed to reside
inside small remote access devices that connect small groups of users or branch offices to a corporate network or the Internet.
Based on the PowerPC chip designed by Motorola (www.mot.com), Apple Computer Inc. (www.apple.com) and IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com), the MPC860T
is a high-speed successor to Motorola's MPC860 family, says Ferenc
Koplyay, program manager for Motorola's Networking and Computing Systems Group.
While the MPC860 is capable of delivering data across a network at 10
megabits per second over an Ethernet link, the MPC860T can route data at Fast Ethernet rates, or 100 Mbps, Koplyay says.
Not quite powerful enough to take on all the data transfer chores of a
high-speed router built for the corporate enterprise or the Internet
backbone, the MPC860T has sufficient power to move information to and
from so-called personal routers, such as the popular Pipeline from
Ascend Communications Corp., which are designed for a single user or a small network of personal computers.
Although Koplyay wouldn't say which remote access vendors will deliver
equipment based on the new chip, he says most of the major network users
-- including 3Com Corp. (www.3com.com), Ascend (www.ascend.com) and Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com) -- have delivered remote access equipment based on previous generations of the chip.
A 25-megahertz version will ship in volume in the first quarter of 1998, priced at $55 per chip. |
