IBM copper will appear in an Intel Netfinity in June

A senior executive at IBM in Europe gave details today of his company's plans to include copper technology in its Intel-based servers. The move is part of a plan IBM has to bring technology from its S/390, RS and AS/400 series into the Intel space, said Tikiri Wanduragala, IBM's senior consultant for the Netfinity server range. He said that the plans, which include a system on a chip project called Blue Logic, were part of IBM's X-Architecture, which will extend well into the next century. The PowerPC chip will sit on a RAID controller and similar technology will also be migrated to AS and RS machines, said Wanduragala. IBM will also introduce mainframe technology called Netfinity 7000M10 "chip kill correction" on its high end servers, he said. Wanduragala revealed that IBM is also working with Intel on Merced technology. He said: "We're going work on core logic and IBM engineers are designing the support chips." However, he said that in his opinion Intel will not incorporate any copper technology in Merced, although it could be an option for future processors. Wanduragala also said that IBM will introduce Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon machines over the next month. The low end machines, the Netfinity 3000, the 5000 and the 5500M10 are already in production. Server platforms do not take advantage of the Streaming SIMD instructions in the Pentium III, he said, but will over a performance boost of around seven per cent over systems using the Pentium II. In the middle of the year, IBM will introduce systems based on Intel's Profusion (Corollary) technology. ®