Tenchusatsu,
New article about NGIO vs. Future I/O. Check the third paragraph below that I copied and pasted. I'd think, that, with all the adversity Compaq has gone through in the last two years or so, one of their people wouldn't be quoted being derogatory toward anyone (even if he is right), much less to an important supplier to them. Maybe Pfeiffer's abrasiveness hasn't worn off yet at the company. It seems to me that Gateway has done a bangup job this year, even after spinning their wheels with AMD for a while. Dell, well, what can you say about Dell. Compaq might be in serious trouble, IMO. Oh, Jimmy Mac would say they shouldn't have cut Alta Vista loose, either.
NGIO revs up the speed of its new technology...........
While some pundits predict that the NGIO and Future I/O standards will converge, Jim Garden, an
analyst with Technology Business
Research, said he expects the NGIO standard to win the horse race. "The camp that has Intel in it will
win out by sheer volume,"
Garden said...............
"This is what we expect from Intel. It's the Intel spec-of-the-week club," said Ken Jansen, director of
advanced server architecture and
design for the Industry Standard Server Division at Compaq.
NGIO Kicks Up I/O Tempest
Jul. 30, 1999 (InternetWeek - CMP via COMTEX) -- BACKERS OF A PROPOSED replacement for
the PCI
bus plan to rev up the speed of their new technology.
The Next Generation I/O (NGIO) Forum, spearheaded by Intel, Sun Microsystems and Dell Computer
for a
total of about 60 companies, said it plans a Fat Pipe version of its NGIO switched-fabric I/O
architecture.
Due out by the end of the year, the new version will run at a 25 Gbps to 250 Gbps throughput rate in
each
direction.
The NGIO Forum recently released the first generation of its specification for a switched-fabric
architecture,
running at 2.5 Gbps per channel in each direction.
I/O devices such as storage and networking cards which take advantage of the first-generation NGIO
spec
will probably ship by the end of next year, said Charles Andres, chairman of the marketing
workgroup of
NGIO Forum and group manager of I/O technologies at Sun Microsystems. Andres declined to
comment on
when Fat Pipe devices will ship.
The faster version of NGIO will be more competitive with a rival technology being developed,
called Future
I/O, which has the backing of about 100 companies, including Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
Future
I/O will support 12.5-Gbps throughput in each channel, much faster than NGIO's proposed 2.5-Gbps
throughput. NGIO will likely have the advantage of beating Future I/O to market; products based on
Future
I/O will ship in 2001-a year later than NGIO.
Congestion
Designed to replace the PCI bus, both NGIO and Future I/O are switched-fabric architectures, where
every attached processor,
network card, disk drive and other device has a direct connection to every other device attached to
the fabric. With this architecture,
each additional connection brings a nearly linear increase in throughput. In comparison, PCI is a bus
architecture, where all devices
share a single data pipeline, and each additional connection adds congestion to the bus. PCI moves
data at a relatively sluggish
132 megabytes per second.
While some pundits predict that the NGIO and Future I/O standards will converge, Jim Garden, an
analyst with Technology Business
Research, said he expects the NGIO standard to win the horse race. "The camp that has Intel in it will
win out by sheer volume,"
Garden said.
Backers of Future I/O criticized the NGIO plans, saying two generations of I/O technology are too
many to release in a single year.
"This is what we expect from Intel. It's the Intel spec-of-the-week club," said Ken Jansen, director of
advanced server architecture and
design for the Industry Standard Server Division at Compaq.
But Garden said he expects the Fat Pipe version of NGIO will be used in high-end servers, while the
first version of NGIO will be used
in lower-end machines.
---
GET ON THE BUS
The proposed replacement for PCI bus, called Next Generation I/O or NGIO, is backed by Intel and
60 vendors including Dell and
Sun. Facts worth noting about NGIO:
- Recently released first-generation spec, which runs at 2.5 Gbps
- Fat Pipe spec due out by year's end, to run at 25 Gbps to 250 Gbps Rival spec, Future I/O, backed
by IBM, HP, Compaq and about
100 companies, will run at 12.5 Gbps |
