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To: DHB who wrote (38923)	3/25/2000 11:55:00 AM
From: Orion	Respond to of 93625

The PS2 show goes on Another "unexpected" feature now with PS2 you can also : COPY DVD TO VIDEO TAPE. This will really be a Must Have in 2000 ;-), what a wonderful appliance they did. Badly is it illegal... eetimes.com Orion

To: DHB who wrote (38923)	3/25/2000 11:56:00 AM
From: Mihaela	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

SiTera preps Prism net processors for April launch By Loring Wirbel EE Times (03/24/00, 4:25 p.m. EST) LONGMONT, Colo. ? SiTera Inc. will make up for being one of the last network processor vendors to sample product when it launches six members of its Prism IQ2000 architecture in early April. Having waited six months for final versions of the Prism processors to emerge from its foundry, SiTera executives won't talk about the IQ2000 family before rollout. But sources who have seen early samples say the processors will be notable for low power dissipation ? around 7 watts for 673-pin chips. The six members of the family will be distinguished only by I/O options, and all will feature the same core set of processors. On each chip, four 200-MHz multicontext proprietary RISC engines perform multivariate packet header processing. SiTera sources stress that the Prism devices are not intended for route processing or system control and that they should be used along with general-purpose coprocessors. SiTera has signed deals to use embedded RISC controllers from Integrated Device Technology Inc. and QED Inc. as off-chip coprocessors. The four RISC-like cores on the Prism chips, however, are SiTera's proprietary design. The quad cores interface to the off-chip host controller and to an on-chip Rambus memory controller via a 50-Gbit/second internal streaming bus called the FusionBus. In the first generation of products, SiTera will not provide details of FusionBus to partners. However, the company is discussing the possibility of having security processors from Hi/fn Inc. and Rainbow Technologies Inc., or packet classifiers from Fast-Chip and Switch-On Systems Inc., connect directly on FusionBus in subsequent generations. Open I/O bus SiTera does provide system-level partners with an open I/O bus, called FocusBus, that is an extension of a Utopia-style physical interface. SiTera has provided HDL models of the Focus interface to its customers for the past several months, and the combination of Focus behavioral models and software application programming interfaces has made the Prism model one of the more open in the network processor industry. "Some specialized devices like standalone packet classifiers may be ideal for addressing the higher ends of the market, say OC-192 [10 Gbits/s] and above," said a source close to SiTera. "Prism was intended to serve the center of the market, in the OC-3 to OC-48 space, with a device that performed many functions well at moderate speeds." In addition to the four general-purpose RISC engines, the Prism chips have special hard-wired coprocessors for functions such as multicast management, table lookup, packet classification, context control, direct memory access and order management. Additionally, four small engines are dedicated to quality-of-service (QoS) packet prioritizing, offering dedicated support for such algorithms as random early discard, weighted random early discard and weighted fair queuing. Even the hardware accelerators retain a degree of configurability, and SiTera is keeping the RISC and QoS engines as programmable as possible, to accommodate updates in standards. The company is working with several QoS software specialists for updated protocol stacks, including Data Connection, Globespan/Ficon, Harris & Jeffries, Inverness Systems and OpenIP. The period from October to March was a frustrating one for SiTera. Its SoftNet suite of APIs and data path forwarding code was finished and system emulations were done, but the company had to wait for rudimentary mask changes in the fab. Yet SiTera did not lose any beta customers ? in part because the turmoil in the network processor market caused by acquisitions made customers reluctant to change architectures. Agere Inc. and C-Port Corp. were acquired by Lucent Technologies and Motorola Inc., respectively. The mergers left only MMC Networks Inc. in general-purpose realms, and small players in packet-classifier fields, as direct competitors. The six versions of Prism will be priced identically at $250 each in high volumes. Two processors for high-end network core functions will feature full 32-bit Focus interfaces. Another pair of processors, aimed at enterprise server load balancing, will combine dual 16-bit Focus interfaces and dual Gigabit Ethernet media-access controllers. The final pair, intended for low-speed service aggregation, will offer four 16-bit Focus interfaces. All six devices will be offered in versions with 16 or 32 kbytes of on-chip memory. eetimes.com

To: DHB who wrote (38923)	3/26/2000 1:47:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Dan Burton; The RDRAM penalty came to over $1000 on a 256MB system, with the same processor. By comparison, the most recent computer I bought is an Athlon with 768MB, the total cost w/o monitor is $1660, something like a third of the cost of a similar RDRAM equipped box, but with quite similar performance. Price is still very much an issue. So is reliability. -- Carl P.S. The link was: alienware.com A better computer design link, in my opinion, is at: hdnw.com