NGIO-FIO some talk, no compromise......
techweb.com
oth sides signal impasse in search for PCI's successor --
Intel, IBM break off talks on PC interconnect
Rick Boyd-Merritt
Santa Clara, Calif. - Negotiations aimed at ending a dispute over the
interconnect beyond PCI for future PC servers are at a standstill. Neither the
Next-Generation I/O Forum, which is backed by Intel Corp., nor the Future I/O
group, which is supported by IBM Corp., Compaq Computer Corp. and
Hewlett-Packard Co., is willing to completely close the doors on a possible deal,
but both sides seem to feel they have reached an impasse.
"The proposal we suggested was not accepted and vice versa," said Tom
Macdonald, a general manager at the server group of Intel (Hillsboro, Ore.) and
a leader of the negotiations for the NGIO Forum. "We've made some significant
progress in some areas but we've been unable to close on other issues. We will
continue to talk , but there is no immediate breakthrough."
Another representative of the NGIO group described the situation more
forcefully. "At the moment the discussions are off," said Dell Computer Corp.'s
Gary Abbott, a founding member of the NGIO Forum. "In the end a single
standard probably does need to exist, but we may have to let the marketplace
battle that out for awhile."
If the two sides fail to find a compromise, the split would affect computer
makers, adapter card makers and end users, all of whom will have to choose
between the two I/O specifications and what would likely be a more fragmented
market of higher-priced systems, peripherals and adapter cards. What's worse,
analysts said, end users could sit out a round of upgrades while the split shakes
out, and that would cool the market for PC servers, one of the last bastions of
significant profits for both Intel and PC makers.
The NGIO group has released a draft specification for a 2.5-Gbit/second
channel I/O architecture to its members. The group said it hopes to implement
the scheme in servers that will ship late next year using Intel's Foster 32-bit
processor.
For its part, the Future I/O group has said it aims to have available an I/O
specification that will offer 1-Gbyte/s throughput late this year, though it does
not expect to see it used in servers until 2001, possibly targeting Intel's 64-bit
McKinley processor, a successor to next-year's Merced chip.
Both sides agree that today's PCI bus is rapidly running out of gas. They
disagree over just when a replacement needs to come to market and at what
sort of data rate that replacement should hit the ground.
Future I/O representatives "would prefer to start from scratch and create a new
spec," Macdonald said. "But their schedule is a year behind ours. And the reality
is it could take two years or more to work out a fresh approach, and I don't
think the market should have to wait."
For its part, the Future I/O group characterizes the NGIO plan as a rush to
market with a channel architecture that initially will be too slow to offer users a
compelling change. Rather than move to NGIO this year, Compaq, IBM and
HP collaborated to develop PCI-X, a version of PCI that can run at speeds up
to 132 MHz and offer throughput of 1 Gbyte/s. They plan to roll out the first
servers to implement PCI-X later this year.
'What's right with NGIO?'
The Future I/O group said it fears NGIO will be rejected by users because it
could actually offer lower throughput than the 530 Mbytes/s users get today
with 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI. "It's not a question of what's wrong with NGIO, but
what's right with it," said a representative of the Future I/O group, who asked
not to be identified. "Adaptec's next-generation SCSI card will have greater
bandwidth than NGIO. They don't know how to solve that problem."
"Fundamentally the issue is timeliness," Intel's Macdonald said. "NGIO has a
spec, and backers like Hitachi, Dell and Sun, who are ready to make products
and won't be stopped. Future I/O is a bunch of Powerpoint slides. We don't
believe the right strategy is to delay getting our technology to the market."
"We did several things the Future I/O group wanted us to do, but if it comes to
flipping the deadline out another year we are not willing to do that," Dell's
Abbott said. Next year's transition to the Foster processors will be "the next big
inflection in the technology and if you miss that you are out."
For its part, NGIO has launched a new working group, dubbed Fat Pipes, that is
exploring ways to combine NGIO channels to quickly ratchet up bandwidth.
"The reality is NGIO is faster than anything you will find in a mainframe today,"
Intel's Macdonald said. "This exceeds what most of the market will demand in
terms of scalability and reliability."
In addition, NGIO representatives countered that they are targeting a low cost
point by using a serial bus and existing Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel
physical-layer silicon, and the more-radical Future I/O approach will be too
costly. The Future I/O source denied that, saying, "We are very sensitive to
cost."
The Future I/O source said the two parties have not broken off talks but
concede that tough issues still separate the two. "We were engaged in
conversations that have been moving at a fairly reasonable pace, and we have
reached tentative agreements in some areas," he said. "Nevertheless Intel
seems to be sticking to its guns on shipping NGIO. We are not seeing much
flexibility there."
Both groups were in close discussions and had made mutual concessions as
recently as last month but hit insurmountable sticking points as the negotiations
proceeded.
FC bring on that next spec......
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