A famous developer of core-logic devices for servers, ServerWorks Corporation, announced their intention to built in Gigabit Ethernet support in their products. The company is going to utilise technologies already developed by the parental Broadcom.

According to Raju Vegesna, the president and CEO of the company, ServerWorks will integrate Gigabit Ethernet support in the North-Bridges of their future chipsets. The technology will be first introduced with the core-logic sets for Intel’s 0.09 micron processors. A little bit earlier, the company will bring Broadcom’s controllers in their I/O Bridges Grand Champion Ethernet I/O. The latter will be supplied in two versions:

• Grand Champion Ethernet I/O Bridge or CIOB-E will include dual 10/100/1000Mbit Ethernet controller as well as 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X bus, supporting up to four devices;
• Another version of this chip, the CIOB-ES, will add support of differential signaling to an external SERDES interface for optical and backplane applications.

ServerWorks is also going to offer two low-end I/O contollers: the 5704 supports a single 133-MHz PCI-X device, and the 5703 provides one Gigabit Ethernet connection and supports a single 66/133-MHz PCI-X device.

The new chips will dissipate only 3-5W of heat, allowing to significantly reduce prices on servers due to highly integrated design of these solutions. The newly revealed I/O controllers will be connected to the North Bridges via IMB2 bus with peak bandwidth of 3.2GB per second.

For server management purposes, the CIOB-E supports the IPMI management interface and four SMBus ports. The CIOB-E is made using 0.13 micron process at TSMC and will be priced at about $50 each in the quantities srarting from one thousand units. Samples are available now.