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IBM today announced a new networking chip focused on providing increased performance in a compact design with low power usage.
The PowerPRS 64Gu packet routing switch, set to be widely available in October, allows networking gear makers to build high-bandwidth applications in a smaller switch fabric board form factor and to expand to higher aggregate throughput and number of ports without replacing entire systems, IBM officials said.
The PowerPRS 64G can support the development of single-stage switch fabrics with as many as 32 ports for OC48c and multiple Gigabit Ethernet applications or as many as 8 ports for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC192c applications.
The new chip set, when combined with the new IBM PowerPRS C48 switch fabric interface or existing PowerPRS C192 switch fabric interface, is aimed at a wide range of networking applications, such as enterprise, WAN edge, Web content routers, SANs, multiservice backbone switches and mobile base stations, IBM officials said.
The chip set has been under development for about the past year, said Gilles Garcia, strategic marketing manager for networking. It is about 40 percent more compact and provides a 30 percent improvement in power consumption compared to similar chip sets, he said.
Garcia said he expects the earliest use for the chip set to be in networking gear that will help companies aggregate multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections in enterprise and metropolitan networks as well as for mobile bay stations.
The chip set should be incorporated into production networking hardware by the middle of next year, he said.