Monaco - Re: "can you explain what this is all about, an what significance it has in the realms of the universe?? "
This is a "power struggle" of sorts to determine the physical and electrical interface of a faster external bus for advanced Server systems.
Apparently, HP, Compaq and IBM cooked up an extension, PCIx, to the existing PCI bus on their own and dumped it in Intel's lap only a week ago, as fait d'accompli.
The HP, IBM Compaq troika may (it isn't clear) want to keep this proprietary and/or charge royalties in order to give themselves some competitive advantage over companies like Dell that use Intel "canned" Server solutions.
Meanwhile, Intel seems to have only recently released "advanced PCI" chip sets of its own that extend the bus to 66 MHz and 64 bits wide. For a much more advanced bus, Intel seems to be re-evaluating the parallel bus in its entirety, looking instead at a Gigabit serial bus, more akin to the I/O Channel structure commonly used by mainframes.
So, there is bound to be a long, protracted, public battle for control of the future server architecture - it appears to be starting rather ugly.
Paul |
