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.
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