By Heather McLean, 11 February 2002 15:28
NEWS IBM is stuffing two gigabytes of data into one gigabyte of space on chips for its skinny servers, making them even thinner. Big Blue developed the technology alongside ServerWorks, a chipset manufacturer and subsidiary of communications chip maker Broadcom. The two companies signed a deal in 2000 to combine technologies plus research and development for the creation of a memory-expanding chip that is now set to make servers cheaper and smaller. The technology - Memory Expansion Technology (MXT) - doubles memory using compression techniques. Compression generally slows down processes as data needs to be expanded again to be used, but MXT uses a 32MB cache memory that stores uncompressed data and so reduces time loss. Under the terms of the deal, ServerWorks will sell MXT to all of IBM's competitors including Hewlett Packard and Compaq.
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