Following its recent announcement of the latest generation of Alpha Peripheral Component Interconnect-based RISC workstations (CI No 2547), Digital Equipment Corp has launched its first Asynchronous Transfer Mode products: the GIGAswitch/ATM System and the ATMworks 750 Network Interface Adaptor. DEC claims it has several industry-first technology developments and has accordingly submitted them to the ATM Forum. Some of these new developments include an approach to overcoming head of line blocking so that bandwidth is increased dramatically: a remedy to eliminating cell loss due to network congestion, and resilient virtual circuits to enable re-routing within wide area network. The GIGAswitch/ATM System is a high performance 10.4Gbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch particularly suited for use in backbone local area network and high performance workgroups. The first in DEC’s family of Asynchronous Transfer Mode adaptors, the ATM works 750 Adaptor, enables the system to run client-server computing or multimedia network applications due to the guaranteed bandwidth it offers and the low latency capabilties of Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks.
