Wrapping up some of the details of the Protocol Engines project to develop very high speed networking protocols and implement them in silicon (CI No 940), Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Inc, Mountain View, California and its spin-out company, Protocol Engines Inc in Santa Barbara, California have signed of a $5m plus joint development contract to […]
Wrapping up some of the details of the Protocol Engines project to develop very high speed networking protocols and implement them in silicon (CI No 940), Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Inc, Mountain View, California and its spin-out company, Protocol Engines Inc in Santa Barbara, California have signed of a $5m plus joint development contract to implement the Xpress Transfer Protocol in VLSI. Xpress is a non-proprietary Transfer Layer Protocol – layers three and four of the Open Systems Interconnection reference model – that is being developed by a consortium of computer and communications systems manufacturers led by Protocol Engines to support real-time distributed and transaction processing over FDDI Fibre Distributed Data Interface, Metropolitan Area Networks and other high speed transmission media. Existing Transport Layer software implementations – such as TCP/IP, XNS, TP-4 present bandwidth and response time limitations for second generation networks, the partners say. Under the terms of the development agreement, Silicon Graphics and Protocol Engines jointly own all rights to any VLSI implementation of Protocol Engine of the Xpress Protocol to be marketed by the Santa Monicans. The initial Protocol Engine implementation will support full bandwidth FDDI 100Mbps throughput – between applications. Higher performance implementations at 1 Gbps for gateway and server applications are planned by the two.
