Gelsinger demos USB 3.0, PICe 3.0 and other new toys

PAT GELSINGER GAVE the afternoon keynote at IDF today, and it started off with some rather tame enterprise parts, then moved on to the fun stuff. First up was virtualisation, and a show and tell of the virtualisation vendors.

The one interesting one was presented by John Fowler of Sun with its upcoming, unannounced VM on its unannounced Tigerton/Caneland box. The most interesting bit is that, because it is running on Solaris,and you run Windows under that, the IO and storage are Solaris based and simply exposed. If you run Windows under Solaris, you get a real fault-tolerant file system on a toy OS.

The one time Itanium was mentioned was in a new Hitachi Virtage blade. This blade is running Montvale, aka Montecito v.07. Other than that, the red-headed step-chip was absent from just about everything.

Next was security, and they gave the quick rundown of VPro 2007 aka Weybridge. We told you all about it here, check it out if you are into virtualisation security. The next-gen VPro is called McCreary, coming in 2008. It will have a TPM v1.2 on the chipset, AMT 5.0 and a technology called Danbury. We will have a full write up on Danbury later today.

Going to I/O, we have the announcement of PCIe 3.0, Quickassist and USB3.0. PCIe 3.0 has twice the bandwidth - that would be 10Gbps - dynamic power management and supports accelerators. This used to be called Genesseo, but now has some marketing name related to Quickassist.

USB3.0 is probably going to be the biggest one of the bunch. They are aiming for 10-times the bandwidth, which would put it at about 5Gbps. For this you need optical, and USB 3.0 cables have an optical link in the current form. Backwards compatible, loads of bandwidth, optical and hopefully available in 1H/08.

Another optical link was the FCoE announcement, aka T11. It does just what it sounds like; puts fiber channel over vanilla ethernet. Intel has 10GigE adapters in copper and fiber for that, buy 12.

Then comes storage. Intel is getting into SSDs and they were showing of prototypes and vague specs. The specs were SATA 3.0, 10-50x the IOPs and a 4.5x power savings, all with twice the write speed. What this is over was not stated, but I don't think it will be all that slow in any case.

Gelsinger then mentioned Skulltrail and pointed to a box without any more comment. There are several of these boxes at the show, so more info will be forthcoming.

The system diagrams for Nehalem were also shown off, but that is old news, see here and here. They then demo-ed probably the most important bit of the show, a 2S Nehalem system running. Getting one CPU up is easy, the second is much much harder with a new interconnect. Intel did it.

In general, there was a lot new here, more than can be covered in a single story. Much of it will be on your desktop in a year or two, most of it not esoteric server side technology. All I have to say looking back to the spring IDF is .... Yo! µ