Banderacom's Single-Chip InfiniBand SoC

The discussions from earlier this year about whether machines of the future would use 3GIO InfiniBand, PCI-X, Fibre Channel or some other internal interconnect have pretty much died down, primarily because it looks like we'll see them all used to a certain extent and maybe even Rambus' RaSer to boot. Banderacom is of the InfiniBand persuasion and just told us about its new IBandit target channel adaptor (TCA) called BDC 22104, which is an InfiniBand system-on-a-chip. It's available now for quantity purchase by OEMs for $225 per piece. Deliveries of the IBandit TCA in the first half of 2002 will support product qualifications and customer trials by system vendors, with deliveries in the second half of 2002 growing larger to support system vendor introductions and production shipments. Product and software development kits supporting the BDC 22104, however, are available now. The IBandit TCA offers an integrated InfiniBand Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) and four media access controllers (MACs) on a single chip that supports both 1X and 4X InfiniBand links for up to 10 gigabits per second of throughput, along with a 133 MHz PCI/PCI-X bus. The chip also includes an InfiniBand protocol engine that Banderacom says accelerates the performance of InfiniBand transport functions in the chip's hardware, for aggregate internal transaction switching throughput speeds of a whopping 150 gigabits per second. The BDC 22104 is optimized for InfiniBand target applications like bridging from InfiniBand devices to Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and TCP/IP devices, as well as I/O protocols such as Remote Network Device Interface Specification (RNDIS) and SCSI-over-RDMA Protocol (SRP). Just too many protocols to keep track of, if you ask me.