Good Q JR, Don't want them to miss this market....They(INTC and others) keep working on the I/O bottleneck.......
SUNW & INTC - Fat Pipes and NGIO
Sun shakes up Wintel crowd with NGIO alliance
zdnet.com
By Deborah Gage, Sm@rt Reseller
February 26, 1999 12:25 PM ET
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems Inc.'s alliance with Intel Corp. and Dell
Computer Corp. on the Next Generation Input/Output architecture was the talk of the
Intel developer forum here this week. And it has Intel's traditional partners worried.
Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. have invested
heavily in Intel architecture through the years and have counted on Intel's loyalty in
return. Microsoft in particular is already grappling with delays of Windows 2000, and
now it is faced with supporting two competing server architectures if Intel cannot reach
an agreement with the Future I/O Forum spearheaded by Compaq, HP and IBM.
Microsoft has invested in development for Compaq's Alpha chip and plans simultaneous
releases of Windows 2000 on Intel and Alpha.
The split has been brewing for months. Parties on all sides agree that current I/O
architecture has become a bottleneck and must change. I/O performance -- the ability
to get data between peripherals and the CPU -- has not kept up with peripheral
performance or CPU performance, and a bus-based architecture is becoming too hard
to implement. Opportunities to make such fundamental changes are rare, and whoever
controls the standard will reap big rewards.
Tensions rise
But the companies disagree on how to change. NGIO members tout NGIO's flexibility
and its ability to isolate peripherals so that a faulty one cannot bring down an entire
system. Future IO members say NGIO
leaves behind too much legacy technology and that Intel should not be too powerful.
Intel announced NGIO at its September developers forum and then cohosted a meeting
on NGIO with Sun last November. Sun and Intel had been working together on NGIO
for about a year, after Sun approached
Intel about supporting a new I/O architecture developed by Sun. NGIO is
processor-independent, allowing each company to guard information about its own chip
architecture.
Compaq, HP and IBM, meanwhile, were already at work extending Intel's PCI bus
architecture without Intel's blessing, and earlier this month the companies held the first
meeting of their own forum -- Future I/O -- to carry that work forward. Compaq at
some point was also working with Intel on NGIO, which Intel says it started two years
ago, but neither company will discuss details.
Intel: It shouldn't be catastrophic
Publicly both sides play down the dispute, and negotiations are ongoing. "Because we
work on so many things together, it is not surprising that something like this should
happen, nor should it be catastrophic," says Intel Corporate Vice President John Miner.
"There are three empty seats on the NGIO steering committee."
Future I/O members say Intel has already made concessions by allowing each member
of the NGIO steering committee to have a vote on the specifications. The fact that Intel
is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission has made the company
especially sensitive to any allegations of improperly controlling intellectual property.
But Intel does insist on its right to set the basic standard for I/O architecture as it has set
standards in so many other areas. And Intel's partners say privately the rift hurts.
"We just got Merced, and our engineers are already scratching their heads because it's a
totally different chip from what's come before," said one partner. "It took eight to 10
months to get Xeon systems out the
door, and here we're looking at a new instruction set, new operating system, new
applications -- everything is new. Plus we've got the transition to RDRAM, and Intel is
starting to talk about McKinley. We've got a lot on our plates."
Partners also question Intel's wisdom in relying on Sun, whose CEO Scott McNealy
regularly expresses his disdain for Wintel and refuses to ship Intel-based systems. "Why
doesn't Intel see that?" one asks.
Sun forges ahead
Sun, meanwhile, will support NGIO in Solaris and SPARC and will integrate Jini
into the architecture. At the first meeting of the NGIO Alliance Monday night,
Sun announced it is chairing a Fat Pipes Working Group. Fat Pipes is a
high-bandwidth cousin to NGIO, suitable for servers, that promises to move an
order of magnitude more data in the same amount of time.
At an NGIO seminar on Tuesday, Sun and Intel trotted out a series of high-level
supporters, demonstrating that NGIO could carry Intel into lucrative new markets. "We
are very excited about this, and the military is excited about it too. This is like the
transition from the horse to the internal combustion engine," said Ray Alderman, the
executive director of the trade association VITA.
Dell's role, meanwhile, appears to be to provide a high-volume channel for Intel-blessed
architecture. "Dell's intellectual property is its business model," said one NGIO member.
"No one -- not Compaq or HP or anyone -- can match Dell's inventory turns. It's built
into their business."
Would these plans eventually make it all the way to the MicroSparc, or is this just for faster servers?
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