News

posted on 08 April 2008 08:11

AMD has produced reference designs compatible with the Storage Bay Bridge (SBB) 2.0 spec, based on embedded versions of its Athlon processor, together with three forthcoming dual core versions of that chip.

SBB is a standard promoted by storage-using and storage-producing OEMs to facilitiate component interchangeability through standard building blocks. AMD's claim is that storage vendors building network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) products with interfaces such as GigE, 10GigE, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand, could use its reference design kit to cut three to nine months off their design cycles.

The reference design kit (RDK) includes both CPU and support chipsets, schematics and layout source files, with reference design hardware to be available from AMD partner Newisys Data Storage.

AMD also said it will introduce three low-power versions of its Athlon X2 dual-core CPU: the 3400e; 3600+; and 4200+, so as to offer a spectrum of processing power for storage hardware OEMs.

The company has worked with Microsoft, FalconStor and AMI on its SBB 2.0 RDK.

Xyratex' recently announced 2.5-inch drive array is an SBB-compatible design.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}