News
Compaq, Intel Work Together on Low-Power, Dense Servers
- By Scott Bekker
- 05/09/2001
Compaq Computer Corp. and
Intel Corp. are working together on low-power chips and high-density servers.
The industry giants announced the joint engineering and marketing efforts this week at Networld + Interop.
Intel’s ultra low-voltage processor is code-named Tualatin. Intel is playing catch up to Transmeta for mindshare in the low-power chip space, a subject of increasing importance as California continues to face power problems.
With the agreement, Compaq is committing to the Tualatin chips for its “hyper-dense” server architecture under the code name QuickBlade, which is scheduled for the second half of the year.
Compaq faces pressure in the low-power, high density space from nearly everyone, including RLX Technologies, a start-up company with several former Compaq executives.
While they didn’t name Transmeta in their announcement, Compaq and Intel made several arguments in support of the partnership that clearly referred to common criticisms of Transmeta. Compaq and Intel said their approach would bring a proven chipset supporting error correcting code, memory protection, memory expansion and server-class I/O; full support for the x86 instruction set; and support for existing development tools and applications. –
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.