Communications chipmaker Agere Systems has created a new line of processors
that speeds up the way data, music and video files get accessed and stored on
a home or small business network.
Agere is releasing the portfolio, dubbed NASn01, to help home and small business users stream multimedia files at 1 gigabit (Gb) per second. The idea is that users want to share, store or view the content as fast as possible, making
chip speed an important component, in addition to servers
that offer content and devices that render it usable.
With NASn01, people in the same house or business can send digital content to and from digital media servers, network-attached storage (NAS) servers and routers.
Companies like Agere, rival Broadcom, and chipmaking kings Intel and AMD
have been scrambling to offer more powerful processors that cater to
multimedia tastes.
Allentown, Pa.’s, Agere said NASn01 is unique. Unlike software-based
technologies that can degrade streaming performance, the NASn01 chips rely
on hardware chip acceleration to make files zip around a network in a home
or small business environment.
The architecture is distinct from other communications chips because the
chips come with a traffic management arbitrator block that provides the
acceleration from the hard drive to the network. The arbitrator
distinguishes between traffic that needs to be guaranteed to arrive on time
versus traffic that can be delayed and allocates bandwidth based on that
data.
The chips, which support Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 connectivity
protocols, can pipe up to 64 multiple streams and preserve content through
full RAID
The chips house a SATA-1
up to eight hard disk drives.
The NASn01 chips are scheduled for general availability in July and are
priced at $36 for 1,000-chip quantities.