16 Gbps PCIe Gen2 to 16 Gbps RapidIO Gen2
bridge chip from IDTI
Integrated Device Technology, Inc. has announced the PCI
Express Gen2 to Serial RapidIO (S-RIO) Gen2 protocol conversion
bridge that extends scalable RapidIO-enabled peer-to-peer
multiprocessor clusters to the x86 processor environment.
The IDT Tsi721 is a 16 Gbps PCIe Gen2 to 16 Gbps RapidIO
Gen2 bridge that translates the PCIe protocol to RapidIO
and vice versa, allowing existing RapidIO systems in the
wireless, defense, imaging, and industrial markets to maintain
their high-performance, low-latency, and high-flexibility
characteristics while enabling the usage of Intel's market-leading
processors. Conversely, the enterprise cloud computing and
server markets that already use PCIe-Gen2-enabled processors
can now take full advantage of RapidIO as a backplane interconnect.
"A highly-scalable, high-performance backplane interconnect
is a key factor in cloud computing, imaging, defense, and
other high performance computing applications," said
Sergis Mushell, principal research analyst at Gartner. "The
availability of new bridge products will allow OEMs in these
markets to deploy x86-based RapidIO systems with peer-to-peer
clustering, scalability, low end to end system latency,
and hardware enabled fault isolation. These features combined
with low overall system power could change the economics
of deployment in the server and cloud computing markets."
"RapidIO is the key interconnect in our embedded computing
strategy. Our customers demand it for its high-throughput,
low-latency, and ease of architecting peer-to-peer processing
clusters on board, across backplanes and between chassis,"
said Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. "IDT's
new bridge product allows us to combine RapidIO with Intel's
i7 and other leading embedded processors, delivering overall
system processing and interconnect performance which was
not possible with available native-RapidIO processors."
The IDT Tsi721 offers 8 direct memory access (DMA) and
8 Messaging engines/channels, each capable of transferring
large amounts of data and operating at line speeds of 16
Gbps. This enables the allocation of multiple engines per
core or context in a multi-core, multi-threaded system -
vastly simplifying system level software development.
Pricing and Availability
The IDT Tsi721 is currently sampling to qualified customers
and is available in a 13x13mm FCBGA package. The IDT Tsi721
is priced at $49 each, in volume. IDT offers Tsi721 software
support for Linux and Windows. Evaluation systems will be
available in Q3 2011.
For more information about IDT's RapidIO portfolio, visit
www.idt.com/go/SRIO-Bridges.