FEBRUARY 21--Speaking to an audience of technology industry engineers, developers, and designers at the recent Intel Developer Forum (San Jose, CA), Intel senior vice president Mike Fister and executive vice president Sean Maloney explained how innovations such as WiFi, PCI Express, Intel Itanium architecture, Hyper-Threading Technology, and Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture are helping to quickly drive new products to market. The adoption of these technologies sets the stage for future industry growth.
PCI Express technology, which operates at 2.5 Gbits/s, illustrates the type of technology that will help lead the industry toward new, cost-efficient enterprise products. Intel is planning top-to-bottom support for PCI Express in its enterprise chipsets beginning in 2004, and new Intel storage and communications products incorporating PCI Express are expected at the same time. New enterprise chipsets planned for 2004 with support for PCI Express technology and DDR2 memory include a four-way Intel Xeon processor MP chipset and a Xeon processor chipset for two-way servers. These products help round out Intel's enterprise chipset portfolio.
PCI Express solves challenging enterprise I/O bandwidth issues and lowers system design costs, as it requires fewer overall chips to implement. It also provides a unified way for enterprise interconnect technologies such as InfiniBand and Ethernet to work together. Combined, these features help lower system costs and increase reliability.
