IBM Unveils E-Commerce Chip

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December 21, 1998 (12:00 AM EST)

By Marcia Savage ,

IBM has a new chip aimed squarely at the e-commerce market.

The chip is expected to aid e-commerce applications by managing thousands of network connections simultaneously. It supports more than 65,000 network connections at the same time, thus opening the door to lower-cost systems. The single chip can replace the many chips now required to manage the thousands of network connections required by e-commerce applications. It can also be programmed for varied bandwidth, IBM officials said.

The new chip can be used in networking equipment, such as routers, hubs, and switches, to manage the large volumes of data required for applications such as multimedia and teleconferencing, according to IBM.

Equipped with a PowerPC processor, the chip works like a traffic controller by partitioning bandwidth for thousands of network connections for server, switch, network node, and user-node interface applications.

"It has a number of connections all with different speeds depending on what the network can provide you right now," said Ken Kellow, senior marketing manager of communications products at IBM Microelectronics. "That's very important in e-business because many of the people delivering these services need to sell these services based on bandwidth."

The chip is available immediately for $192 in volumes of more than 5,000.

"For people who are building systems, it will really cut down the time it takes them to get to market, because they basically have all the hardware function needed for a fairly high speed network on a single chip," Kellow said.

Roy J. Meyers III of RJ Computer Consulting, a VAR based in Abingdon, Md., said he would not be interested in the new chip for a number of years.

"I'm a late adopter because my clients like their systems to work, so I use tried and true technology," Meyers said. "And until someone has tried it and said this is working right, I just don't mess with it.

"It sounds exciting," he added. "But I would really like to see it working first before I put a client into a new technology that might help them or might hurt them."