“The battle pitted Intel against three of its biggest chip
customers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Compaq. At stake has been the
future design of servers–the high-speed, high-end computers that
are the brains behind the Internet and most other networks.
The Intel camp, along with allies including Dell and Sun
Microsystems, favored a standard called Next-Generation
Input/Output, or NGIO. HP, IBM, and Compaq initiated Future I/O,
and rounded up support from 3Com, Adaptec, and Cisco. The
specifications govern how equipment such as network cards or disk
systems plug into the servers.
‘The two specs are going to merge,’ said a source
familiar with the negotiations today. The companies involved
will choose a new name for the standard and plan to have the
technology ready in time for ‘McKinley,’ the second in Intel’s
line of 64-bit chips.”
“Both sides have been easing toward compromise for months but
differences persisted. The Future I/O proponents argued that NGIO
couldn’t transfer data fast enough and therefore didn’t merit the
difficulties of a system design change. The NGIO camp said that
Future I/O would arrive late and was too expensive, and that they
were working on a faster, ‘fat pipes’ version of NGIO to deal with
the data transfer speed issue. Fat pipes refers to a faster way to
transfer data from servers to components such as network
cards.”
