Before this moment the "professional" SCSI interface has always been ahead of its mass counterpart (or competitor?) – ATA. Sometimes, the gap between them was quite large. Since the announcement of SerialATA interface over a year ago, things have changed a little bit. Only now there was established a special industrial consortium called Serial Attached SCSI Working Group, which will be dealing with the development and implementation of Serial SCSI interface (all the current SCSI interfaces are parallel), as you may have already guessed from the name. So far this consortium includes: IBM, LSI Logic, Maxtor and Seagate, however, we are pretty much sure that there should be more members joining in the nearest future.
The main idea of shifting from the parallel to serial interface is almost the same as in case of ATA: the cables will get narrower, longer and of course, the throughput will get much higher. Although the parallel SCSI hasn’t yet exhausted the potential for further bandwidth increase. It is very likely that we will see new Ultra640 SCSI interface within the next couple of years, which will be a continuation of the Ultra320 one.
As for the schedule for the real Serial SCSI products, it is most likely to happen only in 2004 while its ATA brother should settle there next year already.