SAN JOSE, Calif. — The first products to support the PCI-X local bus standard are slated to roll in the second half of this year as new PC servers and supporting silicon emerge in tandem with Intel Corp.'s Willamette and Foster microprocessors. PC and chip makers gathered at the PCI-X Forum on Tuesday (March 14) to pledge their support for the faster, more efficient version of the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus.
While no company detailed specific products, a cross-section of companies said they will ship products supporting PCI-X in the latter half of the year. IBM Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. both said they will support PCI-X in servers before year's end. ServerWorks Inc. said it will support PCI-X in its chip sets, and various suppliers of SCSI, Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet controllers said their chips will also support the faster bus.
The PCI Special Interest Group ratified PCI-X in September as an extension of the PCI 2.2 standard. The spec supports buses that run at clock rates as high as 133 MHz. It also uses a register-to-register design to enable as many as four 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI-X slots on a single bus, up from two previously.
"We have PCI-X programs in both our Intel and Alpha server lines," said Ken Jansen, director of advanced server architecture and design at Compaq (Houston).
IBM plans "to be there in the second half of the year" with servers using PCI-X, said Tom Bradicich, director of server architecture and technology for IBM's PC group (Research Triangle Park, N.C.).
Cores and more
In addition to the servers, IBM will offer PCI-X add-in cards and silicon. IBM Microelectronics is already making PCI-X cores and standard products available for OEMs that want to roll their own system core logic for PCI-X.
"What you are seeing here is the rush to get PCI-X products out," Bradicich said.
Third-party chip set maker ServerWorks (Santa Clara, Calif.) will support PCI-X across all of its product lines starting in the second half, said David Pulling, vice president for sales and marketing at the company.
And Adaptec Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.), a maker of SCSI and Fibre Channel controllers, is "planning to support PCI-X by the end of the year," said ASIC product manager Calvin Nguyen.
Other third parties pledging support for PCI-X include LSI Logic Corp., for SCSI and Fibre Channel; Qlogic Corp., for SCSI; Mylex, for RAID; AMI and Phoenix Technologies Ltd., for BIOS; and 3Com Corp., Broadcom Corp. and Intel Corp., for Gigabit Ethernet.
"You are starting to see support from a variety of companies," said Compaq's Jansen. "I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of backers we've had."
Beyond this year's transition to PCI-X looms a larger shift in computer I/O. The InfiniBand specification will bring a move away from the memory-mapped PCI bus to a channel-based switching matrix that promises to be a more revolutionary change.
A 1.0 version of the InfiniBand spec is expected to be ratified by the 110-member InfiniBand Trade Association this summer. First products are expected to hit in the second half of next year, said IBM's Bradicich.
