As reported yesterday, thebacking of a unified standard called System I/O heals a rift that hadpitted Intel, Dell Computer, and Sun Microsystems against IBM,HP, and Compaq Computer. The standard, a critical part offuture design of high-performance computers, governs how components such asnetwork cards plug into servers and how the servers connect to each other.
The new standard itself will arrive by the end of the year, and the firstsystems shipping with the new architecture will arrive in late 2001,executives said today as they announced the new agreement.
But the companies had plannedfor new servers to be able to take advantage of the design standard much sooner. The Intel camphoped for products using its standard to appear in products in 2000. TheIBM, HP, and Compaq group hoped for its first products to arrive in thefirst quarter of 2001.
"We had been targeting a slightly earlier time frame," said Intel's TomMacdonald in an interview today.
"Taking a little extra time is well worth it to have the best specificationgoing forward," added Dell's Jeff Hornung.
The late 2001 ship date is in time for Intel's McKinley chip, the second inits upcoming 64-bit family. However, the System I/O will work in serversusing less expensive hardware as well, said IBM's Tom Bradicich.
Sun's Mark Canepa wouldn't say whether Sun plans to have its SystemI/O-based designs out in 2001. "As soon as the standard is in place, we'regoing to race to market like everyone else," he said.
System I/O will be governed by a steering committee that will be led byIntel and IBM and will also include Dell, Sun, Compaq, HP, andMicrosoft. Microsoft's Ed Miller said his company had been neutral on thestandards dispute. "System I/O" is a working name only; a formalname will be chosen later.
The group's first meeting will be in October, the companies said.
The System I/O standard uses a method called a "switched fabric" to carrytraffic from server CPUs to peripherals and other servers. The methodessentially puts a miniature network inside the computer, a faster and morereliable method than the prevailing PCI bus.
System I/O will come in three flavors at the outset, with 1, 4, or 12wires going through the fabric, depending on how powerful a server is beingbuilt. Those three flavors will transfer data at 0.5 gigabytes per second,2 GB/sec, and 6 GB/sec, the companies said.