SCIENCE

SAN JOSE, CA -- The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) today announced that eleven leading hardware suppliers are showcasing new products integrating PCI-X, the latest version of the PCI interconnect standard. Several companies, including Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel, have announced plans to adopt PCI-X in upcoming commercial systems. PCI-X is a high-performance extension to the widely used PCI Local Bus that is designed to meet the increased I/O demands of interconnect technologies such as Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet and Ultra320 SCSI. PCI-X offers twice the bandwidth (1.1 gigabytes/sec) of standard PCI without suffering any meaningful increases in cost. Migration to PCI-X is painless since PCI-X adapter cards are backward compatible with previous generations of PCI-based systems. This is good news for PCI's broad installed base, as no special configuration is necessary to use these new adapter cards. "The PCI-X Pavilion at Platform Conference is the industry's first major unveiling of PCI-X-enabled hardware," noted Roger Tipley, president of the PCI-SIG. "Until recently, PCI-X has been a back-room development project for leading-edge technology companies around the world. Now, with the availability of systems, adapter cards, chipsets, testers and support, all design engineers have the tools and building blocks to produce high-volume, reliable products, with the improved performance that PCI-X allows." At the conference, the PCI-SIG will host the PCI-X Pavilion and provide detailed information on the PCI-X interconnect. Adaptec, Interphase, JNI, LSI Logic and QLogic will display Fibre Channel adapter cards; 3Com and Broadcom will show Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards; LSI Logic will debut their Ultra320 SCSI controller card; Mylex will present a PCI-X RAID controller design; and Agilent, FuturePlus and VMetro will demonstrate their PCI-X exercisers and analyzers. Each PCI-X adapter card will plug into a high-end computer board that features ServerWorks' "Grand Champion" SystemI/O enabling PCI-X for each system. In addition to Fibre Channel adapter cards, Adaptec will also showcase Ultra320 SCSI and RAID controllers. IBM Microelectronics and Tundra Semiconductor both plan to display PCI-X to PCI-X bridge products. "JNI is pleased to lead PCI-X based products by integrating this technology into its next generation family of Fibre Channel controllers and host bus adapters," Neal Waddington, CEO of JNI. "PCI-X doubles and in some cases quadruples the available bandwidth within a server therefore making it the only available technology that can fully exploit the I/O bandwidth requirements of the next-generation 2 Gb Fibre Channel storage networking products." "Servers will be the first computing system to adopt PCI-X because I/O is critical to server and server appliance applications," said Kimball Brown, vice president of business development for ServerWorks. "The Grand Champion SystemI/O delivers up to 5 Gigabytes/second of I/O throughput, supporting a maximum of six independent PCI-X bus segments and one traditional 32-bit PCI bus." Several companies are already integrating PCI-X into commercial products, including servers. Compaq recently introduced the ProLiant DL760 server, which has 11 PCI I/O expansion slots, including eight PCI-X slots. Additionally, Compaq is offering an I/O upgrade kit for the ProLiant 8500 server, effectively giving the 8500 the I/O performance of the DL760. Another platform provider, Hewlett-Packard, is dedicated to supporting the PCI-X standard. "Hewlett-Packard eagerly awaits the arrival of PCI-X based products. It will further help customers enhance the I/O capabilities of their systems at a time when systems are being asked to exchange data with ever more complex graphical content," said Gary Erickson, product marketing manager for platform development. "As co-founder of PCI Special Interest Group, HP is a strong believer in standards-based technology, which ultimately allow HP to pass on cost savings to customers."