Intel has given a qualified welcome to the PCI-X specification proposed by IBM, Compaq and HP, but said that it was likely to be the last iteration of PCI. Mitch Schultz, head of IO initiatives at Intel US, said that the company had only just received the proposed specification. "In general our view is that it’s potentially very positive," he said. "It’s the last incremental advance of PCI and we believe that the industry has got to move to some fundamentally new architecture," he said. "We view the next step as a long term direction, perhaps holding good for the next 30 years," he said. While the PCI model had held good for some time, Schultz believed that research Intel had performed showed that another model was needed for high end servers. The direction Intel was proposing was based on how mainframes worked, and not on the PCI model, he added. The industry needed to work together to create its replacement. ®