Intel's Ga-Ga for GigE: Page 2 of 3

The Pro/1000 MT, Intel's other chip announced today, does use the PCI bus and targets mobile devices. Dunn says Intel doesn't intend to offer CSA for mobile devices, because by the time the mobile market needs a new bus -- in 2004 or 2005 -- PCI Express will be ready.

Also today, Intel introduced two high-end server adapters. The PRO/10GbE LR Server Adapter targets servers, particularly for clustering and for large database applications. Intel claims the card is the first to allow a maximum 10 Gbit/s of traffic in a single slot. The PRO/10GbE uses the PCI-X bus, an intermediate step between PCI and PCI Express. PCI-X is faster than PCI and uses a wider bus structure, which allows more data to share the connection at a time. But there's a limit to how much faster and wider these buses can get, so the industry is developing PCI Express, which will aggregate sets of 2-Gbit/s serial links, creating a more elegant way of pushing bandwidth numbers up.

The other card, the PRO/1000 MT Quad Port Server Adapter, combines four 1-Gbit/s ports onto a single card -- something that Intel didn't anticipate having to do until customer requests started coming in.

"There never seem to be enough connections to these systems," Dunn says. "A typical server in a data center will have a primary connection into a LAN and a secondary connection for backup -- that's two. They may also have a connection to storage area networking, and they need a backup for that, too."

Meanwhile, Intel joined the XFP race with the TXN18107 module for singlemode fiber. XFP is a multisource agreement (MSA) for a 10-Gbit/s serial transponder, as opposed to the parallel 10-Gbit/s transponders currently sold.