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Technology Stocks : From Here to InfiniBand -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: higashii who wrote (10)	10/25/2000 2:40:12 PM
From: higashii	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57

Trade Press - Version 1.0 of InfiniBand architecture spec released By Ken Popovich, eWEEK zdnet.com A new interconnect architecture developed to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks is now looming a little larger on the horizon. Today the InfiniBand Trade Association, comprising more than 200 companies, announced the release of InfiniBand Version 1.0, the first version of the spec that is being touted as the successor to today's popular PCI bus architecture. The InfiniBand architecture seeks to ease data-traffic congestion between hardware devices -- a growing concern at increasingly busy business data centers. Companies have been awaiting the release of the spec so that they can begin producing products designed to handle the new architecture. "This is like the starting gun for people to start developing products," said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel Corp.'s (Nasdaq:INTC - news) enterprise server group. Intel and IBM representatives serve as co-chairs of the trade association. The development of InfiniBand is seen as particularly important to Intel, which lacks proprietary data-transfer technology such as that used by fellow InfiniBand members Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news), IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) Products due next year While Pappas didn't discuss specific product plans, such as new chip sets that would be needed to work with InfiniBand, he said the company will begin delivering InfiniBand-based products next year. "Although we're not doing a product announcement right now," he said, "the schedules for our products are lined up so that our customers can ship products to data centers by the end of 2001." Fueled in large part by the explosion of Internet-based business transactions, computer makers have been exploring various options for overcoming the data-transfer limitations of today's technology. Most current systems utilize a PCI bus first introduced in the early 1990s. The PCI bus represented a significant boost in bandwidth over previous ISA solutions, transferring information at 133MB per second, compared to a maximum of 10MB per second for ISA technology. Since then, PCI performance has been boosted to about 500MB, and a newly developed PCI-X version promises up to 1GB-per-second transfer rates. InfiniBand, which relies on a switched fabric-based architecture, will provide a scalable throughput performance range of 500MB per second up to 6GB per second. More specifically, a single InfiniBand link operates at 250MB per second point-to-point in a single direction, but since each link consists of a pair of "fabric threads," with one dedicated to input and another dedicated to output, the total throughput is measured at 500MB per second. Bandwidth can be further increased by adding more links, or channels. Currently, development plans are under way for four-channel InfiniBand, offering 2GB-per-second throughput, and 12-channel InfiniBand, offering 6GB-per-second throughput. The release of Version 1.0 was announced at the second InfiniBand Developers Conference in Las Vegas this week. The gathering drew an estimated 600 attendees. Members of the InfiniBand Trade Association will receive free copies of the spec. Non-members can download a copy of the spec through the InfiniBand Trade Association Web site at infinibandta.org for $19.95, or purchase a CD for $49.95 or bound text version for $249.95.