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To: puborectalis who wrote (17321)	3/12/1999 10:10:00 PM
From: MileHigh	Respond to of 93625

Poseidon chips could put AMD into server market By Jack Robertson EE Times (03/12/99, 3:25 p.m. EDT) SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Poseidon Technology Inc. plans to introduce a memory interface and chip set that could put Advanced Micro Devices Inc. into the PC-server market. Poseidon, a former maker of Intel chip sets, is developing a "simultaneous switched-matrix" chip set to connect up to eight of AMD's forthcoming K7 processors. The chip set, which is expected to reach the market later this year, would make AMD a rival to competitor Intel Corp. in the server market. Rick Shriner, chief executive of Poseidon, said the chip set would enable AMD to offer higher PC-server performance than Intel's upgraded Pentium III Xeon, which is expected to be introduced later this year. "The timing couldn't be better," Shriner said. Poseidon was forced to reinvent itself after its main product — an Intel-compatible P5 chip set — reached end-of-life production, Shriner said. Rather than continuing to compete in the crowded X86 chip set arena, Poseidon moved to a totally new architecture that was ideally suited for the AMD K7, he said. AMD is aware of the Poseidon chip set for K7-based servers, according to a spokesman for AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.), who said the company's strategy is to use independent chip set vendors rather than develop the units itself. AMD has made no secret of its ambition to use the K7 to penetrate the PC-server market, he said. The Poseidon chip set doesn't share a conventional processor bus line to connect memory. "This has always been a bottleneck for traditional server chip sets," Shriner said. "Our switched-fabric architecture connects as many as 14 memory pipelines, each at 3.2 Gbytes/second, individually with each K7 processor. The chip set is completely scalable by connecting memory pipelines to each additional processor." Shriner said he believes Poseidon is the only chip set vendor aiming to link a large number of K7 processors for servers. The switched-matrix architecture is independent of processor type, however, and could work with Intel chips or any of the Unix-based RISC chips, he said.