i/oZONE Products for the week of January 26, 2004
Alliance Semi Says…
Bridge Over Raging Waters -- Alliance's Dual HyperTransport-to-PCI-X
Bridge Delivers Optimized Solution for Compute Applications
Alliance Semiconductor Corporation announced the availability
of its high performance AS90L10204 HyperTransport-to-PCI-X Bridge. The AS90L10204
is optimized for compute applications including workstations, computer servers,
server blades, workstations and desktop PCs.
Alliance's AS90L10204, works with AMD's Opteron and Athlon families of X86-microprocessors, as well as with Transmeta's Efficeon microprocessor. The AS90L10204, microprocessor and South Bridge, create a three-piece chipset that bridges the HyperTransport interface from the Opteron, Athlon or Efficeon microprocessors to the PCI-X bus. This enables system manufacturers to tap into the vast infrastructure of peripherals and system components based on PCI-X, such as Network Interface Cards (NICs), RAID Controllers, Host Bus Adaptors (HBA) and others.
"The AS90L10204 HyperTransport-to-PCI-X Bridge expands the possibilities of today's PC and server system architectures by providing new design options based on the HyperTransport technology," said Robert Napaa, vice president of marketing and business development for Alliance's System Solutions Business Unit. "By using our AS90L10204, customers can design, manufacture and market high-capacity, cost-effective workstations, computer servers, server blades, workstations and desktop PCs."
The AS90L10204 supports two 8-bit HyperTransport interfaces that provide
1.6 GB per second of bandwidth in each direction and a single 64-bit, 133-MHz
PCI-X bus which enables the connectivity to a variety of PCI-X based peripherals
and add-on cards.
analogZONE Says . . .
With Intel, Nvidia, and VIA, and SIS all expecting to ship PXI Express (PCI-X) chip sets before the end of Q2 2004, their HyperTransport/PCI-X bridge is a making a well-timed arrival on the market. While I'm not sure HyperTransport will ever enjoy widespread acceptance in the retail market, it being one of two very viable generic high-performance alternatives (RapidIO being the other) that will keep the Intel bus architecture from gaining a complete death-grip on the market -- especially in high-performance networking and telecom applications.
Alliance's introduction of the AS90L10204 bridge helps keep this niche healthy and growing by giving the non-Intel crowd access to all the high-volume hardware that will inevitably grow up around the PCI-X standard. Whether it's Gigabit NICs or storage controllers, designers will be able to leverage the incredible price/performance ratios that dominate PC-oriented products. The dual HT interface and associated arbitration logic allows two high-performance CPUs to share the bridge seamlessly, and but the cost of implementation. And if you're into really big multi-processor applications, you can cascade up to 32 bridges.
A straightforward design and availability of samples yields a low-sodium rating for Alliance's latest product.
The AS90L10204 is currently sampling with a suite of reference design and software drivers. It will be priced at less than $28 in 10-k piece lots.
| |