Adaptec heeft aangekondigd dat zij zijn begonnen met de levering van de nieuwe AIC-7899W Crossbow Ultra160 SCSI ASIC. De AIC-7899W is pin-compatible met de toekomstige PCI-X Ultra320 SCSI chip van Adaptec en is al voorbereid op de hogere signaal vereisten van de Ultra320 standaard. Moederbord en RAID-controller fabrikanten die nu de AIC-7899W gebruiken, kunnen hun produkten in de toekomst geschikt maken voor Ultra320 SCSI en PCI-X door simpelweg de SCSI chip te vervangen met de nieuwe Ultra320 chip:
Adaptec, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADPT - news), the global leader in innovative storage solutions, announced today that its Crossbow Ultra160 SCSI ASIC (model named AIC-7899W), which incorporates the same pin-out as its forthcoming PCI-X Ultra320 SCSI controller, is now available. OEMs that incorporate this controller in new server motherboard and PCI RAID adapter designs will avoid the expensive and time-consuming process of redesigning their products to accommodate the upcoming next generation PCI-X and Ultra320 SCSI technologies.Crossbow's packaging is designed for Ultra320 SCSI signaling which is much more demanding than Ultra160 SCSI. The packaging provides cleaner signals and greater design margins over the previous Ultra160 SCSI ASIC. In addition Crossbow is backwards software compatible and runs with all currently released Adaptec drivers. Thus Crossbow provides the highest performance for current designs as well as a migration path to Ultra320 SCSI.
[...] The current PCI bus has enough bandwidth for today's dual channel Ultra160 SCSI controllers. However, the forthcoming dual channel Ultra320 SCSI controller will saturate the PCI bus. PCI-X doubles the bus throughput to a full one Gigabyte per second meeting the need for increased bandwidth.
Ultra320 SCSI is the next generation of SCSI, the I/O protocol standard for mainstream direct attached storage requirements. Ultra320 SCSI, due out next year, will transfer data at the rate of 320 MB/sec per channel or 640 MB/sec with dual-channel SCSI controllers. This performance is twice the speed of the current SCSI standard. By offering its Crossbow ASIC now, Adaptec is helping to ensure that OEMs are able to migrate seamlessly to Ultra320 SCSI technology when it becomes available in early 2001.