High-Performance PC Platforms Push Tomorrow's Technology

Unfortunately, it will take some time to generate enough interest to place Serial ATA on the motherboard and to replace the low-cost IDE hard disks on the market today. Serial ATA's promise of higher speeds and simpler cabling must be turned into real products.

Serial ATA will benefit all systems and may be the most important system improvement (except for possibly USB 2). Serial ATA will be complementary to InfiniBand because the two address different aspects of system design.

Feeding data quickly from multiple processors is key to good system performance. Unlike today's designs, memory subsystem design used to be a snap. Sockets and chip-set support was standard. Now two standards are vying for domination: double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM and RAMBUS DRAM (RDRAM). Each one has its own set of interface and socket standards.

DDR SDRAM builds on the standard SDRAM design but doubles the transfer rate by pumping out two words of information every clock cycle. The DDR SDRAM sockets aren't compatible with SDRAM sockets. Small-outline DDR SDRAM is available too.

DDR SDRAM also enjoys significant support from chip-set and memory vendors. This makes it more popular than RDRAM right now.

RDRAM uses a high-bandwidth, low-pin-count interface. The architecture is different from the popular SDRAM interface. New chip-set and processor designs, such as Intel's Pentium IV, can take advantage of RDRAM.

Overall, PC platforms are experiencing significant improvements in architecture and performance. Many of the technologies, like InfiniBand, Serial ATA, and HyperTransport, have yet to prove themselves, but clearly they will be viable in the long run. The main question is, when will this happen? The answer looks to be quite soon.