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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (136395)	5/31/2001 11:22:54 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 186894

Tony - I believe that RLX is shipping now. I have great respect for both the business and technical savvy of the RLX team - those were the people I worked with at Compaq in the mid-90s and they really know their stuff. The RLX blade concept is narrowly focused at the web server market, and it should do a great job there. Architecturally, there are a lot of reasons why that approach is not very good for heavy lifting, and I would suspect RLX would have an alternative strategy - perhaps even a tualatin based blade - for larger jobs. The IBM scuttlebutt - according to one IBM guy I know, who may or may not have the real scoop - is that RLX had planned on working with Compaq but that deal fell apart in fall of 2000. IBM had their own blade architecture but it was a more comprehensive approach - like Compaq's second-generation blade architecture. They used the opportunity of the breakdown in discussions between RLX and Compaq to swoop in and get a position. They were a participant in the October round of funding for RLX and apparently cut a deal to co-market the RLX product at that time. This gave them a quick go-to-market with an ultra-dense product in the market where there is the most need for a low-power machine. They could easily alter their own blade platform to accommodate the RLX blades - I could see a deal where RLX does the low end blades for IBM, and IBM does high end blades which are compatible with the RLX framework. Sun does not have a processor which has any possibility of supporting an ultra-dense architecture, so unless they plan on going with someone else's processor, they have no ability to do an ultra-dense product. They might do a "blade" style thing which takes their current 1U machine and puts it on a blade. That would be a "marketecture" since it would give no power or cooling advantage, just maybe a slightly easier maintenance mechanism. Compaq's approach is pretty clean and efficient. Using tualatin mobile gives them the ability to produce a blade which at idle and at "normal load" has power characteristics which are similar to the transmeta design but with more horsepower per processor. At full power, the tualatin generates more heat than Crusoe, but Compaq figures that based on real-world analysis of current dense server designs, the average power generated will not take them out of the comfort zone. So Compaq's design has the ability to deliver high performance on demand for peak load management, good power and heat management at average loading, and "real" Intel architecture. The last benefit is significant - Compaq can do 2 and 4 way blades - and apparently also 8-way blades down the road - which plug into the same rack as the 1P blades, just using up more slot space. This is much like the Compaq disk cabinets which can hold either 1" or 1 3/4" drives - you just get more drives in the rack with 1". That allowed them to do mix and match as disk drive makers brought out bigger drives in larger form factors, then later brought out the same capacity in slimmer drives. The same would be true for processor technology. I don't know the details of Compaq's blade roadmap but usually reliable press has hinted that they are just waiting on the final tweaks from Intel to bring out the first products, which will be sometime in 4Q of this year.