Intel Corp is expected to respond to the PCI-X plan to upgrade the PCI bus, floated at the end of last week by IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Compaq Computer Corp (CI No 3,490). The company has already begun talking about modifying PCI protocols for more efficient operation, something that wouldn’t require an upgrade from the current 66MHz hardware up to 133MHz, as PCI-X proposes. Mitch Shults, director of server-platform marketing at Intel told EE Times that Intel had known about PCI-X for some time but we didn’t know they were that far along. But Intel says parallel, shared-memory buses are not in its longer-term vision of the future. Work on PCI-X was apparently spurred on by reports that Intel was developing an entirely new, gigabit-class serial bus, and the first details of this, dubbed NGIO for next generation I/O, are expected to emerge next week at the Intel Developer Forum next week, according to the paper. Technology will be derived from the I20 Intelligent I/O and Virtual Interface architecture efforts.
