IBM Corp this week said it has developed a new chip which it claims can guarantee quality of service for e-commerce applications on a network. The chip, which is based on a PowerPC processor, acts like a traffic controller by partitioning bandwidth for more than 65,000 different network connections (e- commerce transactions) simultaneously. It is designed to sit inside networking hardware, such as routers, hubs and switches, and dedicate certain amounts of bandwidth for different applications as they pass across the network. By enabling a large number of simultaneous, independent transactions across a network, systems can be designed with fewer chips than would be required in the past, providing potential cost savings for customers, IBM said. The new chip is a follow-up to an earlier version of the product that was originally developed for IBM’s AS/400 server family. Specifically, the new version provides an on-board PowerPC core for available bit rate (ABR) support, enabling users to define required bandwidth for a given communication or ‘transaction’ across the network. The chip is available immediately for $192 in volumes of more than 5,000, the company said.
