Enter Ethernet

has announced FocalPoint, a 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch chip family with 200 nanoseconds (ns) of total latency, a ten-times improvement over existing solutions, making Ethernet the new cost-effective and high-performance choice for storage, computing and networking backplane and interconnect applications.

Fulcrum says FocalPoint switches are fully-integrated, single-chip solutions that contain as many as 24 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and cost less than $20 per port.

The low latency of FocalPoint switches means Ethernet is comparable to specialty data centre interconnects such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and Myrinet and can be used as an interconnect for high-performance computing and storage systems. Ten Gigabit Ethernet can also now be used as a cost-effective backplane fabric for blade computing systems or AdvancedTCA and other networking systems.

“History has shown that once Ethernet becomes good enough for an application, it dominates that application. FocalPoint’s rich feature set and low latency means Ethernet is now better than the high-speed interconnect alternatives and ready for these applications,” said Bob Nunn, president and CEO of Fulcrum Microsystems.