3GIO may replace PCI officially
  08/01/2001 3:49:44 PM MDT Albuquerque, Nm
  By Dustin D. Brand; Owner AMO

Standing for 3rd Generation Input Output, 3GIO is poised to replace PCI.   The PCI-SIG (special interest group), on Friday will have its board of directors vote on whether or not to adopt a new bus architechture technology by Intel as the next I/O bus standard.

  The PCI-SIG board of directors will vote on the adoption of 3GIO (third-generation I/O) as the PC bus standard to eventually replace current PCI bus technology as well as the proposed PCI-X products.

  Every 5 or so years, Computers because of their advancement, require new Bus technologies to speed the data around the main board/MotherBoard. Before PCI there was Vesa Local Bus, and before Vesa, 16-Bit ISA, and even before that 8-Bit ISA. Currently, PCI and the proposed PCI-X extension range from 133Mbps (bits per second) and 1Gbps. 3GIO has the potential to run nearly 10 times as fast.   The 3GIO standardization, which was proposed to the PCI-SIG less than two weeks ago by supporters of 3GIO, who are led by Intel, could be standardized as early as Friday. Intel is developing 3GIO under the code name Arapahoe.

  Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel's direct competitor has another technology called HyperTransport, which is also a next-generation bus architecture and runs at 12.8Gbps. AMD, which also sits on the PCI-SIG board of directors, isn't proposing HyperTransport over 3GIO, but rather saying it HyperTransport is complementary to 3GIO.

  "I guess we didn't do a good job of communicating [HyperTransport] in the past," said Gabriele Sartori, president of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium and director of technology evangelism at AMD.

  "We are not against the technology [3GIO] and are not doing anything to stop anyone from implementing it," he said. "We believe it is a natural extension of PCI."

  The PCI-SIG board of directors is composed of representatives from Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, AMD, Microsoft, Phoenix Technologies, Texas Instruments, and Server Works.

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