PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - Intel's John Miner, vice president of the communications product group, told developers here Wednesday that, "the heat is on, the clock is ticking," in the race to put in place the building blocks necessary to build systems that can meet the availability and scalability requirements of today's users.
The real heat of the day, however, came from Miner's Intel counterpart, vice president and general manager of the network communications group Mark Christensen, who unveiled Intel's new Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA).
The chip giant announced 13 new products related to IXA that company officials said will enable the next generation of the Internet.
"The challenge is that the Internet of today was designed over the last decade as a transportation network, designed to move information from point 'a' to point 'b,' never really designed to move services," Christensen said.
To remedy that, Christensen said, networks of tomorrow are going to have to be smarter. Intel's effort at creating that smarter network will be this new IXA architecture, which it says is designed to enable the quick, open, and easy addition of new services and capabilities to networks.
Anchoring the architecture will be the IXP 1200 network processor, a re-programmable network engine that is just one of the products Intel introduced in what it is calling "Level One" of its IAX strategy.
The IXP 1200 is composed of seven processors, six of which are multithreaded packet processing engines that can carry out four instructions at a time, and four different buses. At the center of the processor is Intel's StrongArm technology, which will control interaction between engines.
According to Christensen, the StrongArm technology was chosen for its low power requirements, which will enable the company to pack 1000-MIPS of processing power in a five-watt package.
Three of the four different buses in the IXP 1200 are based on existing standards, Christensen said, and the fourth will be freely licensed to third parties so that they can build products capable of plugging into the architecture. The IXP will also contain two new types of memory controllers.
"The IXP provides a level of flexibility about how people want to develop products," said Christensen. "It will not only shorten development cycles, but users will be able to upgrade equipment in the field and keep it out there longer."
In addition to the IAX announcement, Miner opened the second day of Intel's developer forum here by echoing the message put forth in Tuesday's keynote by Intel president and CEO Craig Barrett.
"One of the keys in this environment is taking advantage of high volume standard-based building blocks," Miner said,
Those building blocks, Miner said, will take advantage of Intel's IA-32 and IA-64 server architectures, asserting that there is no architecture other than Intel's that is equipped to handle the demands of future users.
"You have to ask yourself why anyone would deploy anything other than IA-32 or IA-64," said Miner. "There is not another architecture out there that can provide this choice, agility, and flexibility."
Miner underscored that message by saying that Intel's first IA-64 Merced-based systems, when they ship in the middle of next year, will outperform all non-Intel 64-bit systems at that time. Included in that, Miner said, are Alpha-based systems and those built on Sun's UltraSparcIII.
In addition, Miner said, the company is prepared to take its Xeon architecture over the 700-MHz threshold early next year, eventually bumping clock speeds to 1 GHz with its Foster chip in late 2000.
The combination of the two, Miner asserted, will make Intel the architecture of choice for future server platforms.
Also Wednesday, Intel announced that it has established a $200 million development fund to assist companies in developing IAX technologies. The company also announced the acquisition of NetBoost.
All of these moves, officials said, are targeted at building the infrastructure for the Internet of the future.
"The key here is we don't know where this is all going, none of us do," Christensen said. "Because of that, we have to build flexibility and agility into our systems so that customers can build it into theirs."
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