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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (40192)	1/8/2001 2:49:19 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Charles, u don't get it. Broadcom is not buying ServerWorks in order to use BRCM technology to speed up serverworks products. They want serverworks technology for their own stuff. The idea that a fiberchannell backplane will speed an Intel server up to Sun throughput levels is ludicrous. Sun's servers perform because of their multiple 64 bit processors. Guess where the throughput bottleneck is on an fast IA32 server with fiberchannel net cards? Yes, the fiberchannell. That's why you see technologies like the intel network channel aggregation on the net cards used by Compaq and Dell to allow multiple network cards to keep up with the server's throughput. An array of SCSI3 disks can get you bandwidth of nearly 2 gigabytes per second. (The memory bandwidth is typically a little less than that but in the same order of magnitude.) That's about twenty times faster than a fiberchannel network card. The IA32 servers are limited by their processors and software, not motherboard bandwidth. The bandwidth on server chipsets in IA32 servers is the maximum that is allowed by a combination of the laws of physics, semiconducting manufacturing process technology (where intel leads the world) and memory bus technology. This is why Rambus has sold licences to all the major payers includin AMD, SUNW and all the DRAMurai. It is why DDR doesn't work properly - attempting to beat the limitations of crosstalk between adjacent signals on a motherboard. It is why motherboards hve 6 or 12 layers to keep signals apart and to reduce distances of interconnects (to allow highest possible frequencies). etc etc blah blah blah. I'd like to answer your question: "How much do you think a PC server with fibre channel and a backplane to support the kind of bandwidth Sun servers have will cost?" You quantify the kind of bandwidth you are talking about and I will answer your question. I probably have a couple of such servers lying around unused <vbg>.