New PCI-X specification introduced

New PCI-X specification introduced
By Jack Robertson, EBN
February 5, 2002 (5:00 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020205S0021

The PCI-X 2.0 draft specification to increase the I/O standard's speed to 533-megatransfers a second was introduced Tuesday at the Server I/O conference in Monterey, Calif.

The new spec uses double-data-rate and quad-data-rate techniques to dramatically increase the PCI bus bandwidth to 2.1 Gigabytes/second or 4.3 Gbytes/sec.

PCI-X 2.0 has been endorsed by AMD, Compaq, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Server Works. It will interface with adapter cards for Gigabit Ethernet, 10-Gbit Fibre Channel, Ultra640 SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI, Serial ATA, 4X Infiniband, RAID and cluster interconnects.

The draft will be submitted to the full PCI-SIG membership for review this quarter and if approved would be released to the industry in Q2 '02.

In addition to higher speed, PCI-X 2.0 will also include error checking and correction. It is backwardly compatible with previous PCI standards.

Further details of the standard will be available later this week when a presentation at Server I/O Conference will be posted on the organization's web site.