Fujitsu to show off 10 Gb/s switch on a chip board

Fujitsu will display a prototype 10 Gbps switch on a chip board at next week’s Server Blade Summit in Garden Grove, California. The MB87Q3140 single-chip switch targets blade servers for distributed computing and VoIP telecommunications switching.

Blade servers typically consist of a rack mounted chassis with several "blades" or computers on a board inside. The boards communicate to each other via either the server’s backplane network or with an external Ethernet switch. Currently, most invidual blades have 1 Gb/s connections, with the entire server having a 10 Gb Ethernet uplink.

Blade computers could potentially see a ten-fold increase in internal bandwidth, once the chip is integrated. The speed boost is welcomed because network connection speeds, or more accurately the lack of speed, has been the traditional bottleneck to distributed computing. In addition, future storage area technologies like iSCSI will require immense bandwidth.