Intel also is about to build its own tunable lasers based on technology the company acquired when it bought start-up New Focus, Maloney said, a key step in increasing the amount of data that can be shipped over optical fibers. Tunable lasers can be adjusted to send different frequencies of light instead of being locked to a single frequency. Intel last week began selling networking equipment using others' tunable laser technology that can send eight frequencies of light, but the New Focus-based products, due in early 2003, will support 40 or 80 different light channels, spokesman William Giles said. Intel is using technology from its April 2001 acquisition of LightLogic to make the equipment small enough, he added.

But Maloney said standards difficulties could hold back bear - yellow iphone case the now-blossoming world of 802.11 wireless networking, He exhorted the computing and communications industry to prevent a standards war over what will prevail as the current 802.11b standard, also known as Wi-Fi, is supplanted by faster but sometimes incompatible 802.11a and 802.11g standards, "We're going to ruin this technology if people end up confused over a or b or g or whatever," Maloney said, Intel's solution to the problem is to develop a PC card modem, code-named Calexico, which contains Intel wireless chips that work with both 802.11a and 802.11b networks, The modem is due early next year..

In addition, security is a growing concern for wireless technology. Maloney said Intel advocates adoption of the TGi security standard in 2003. Faster server chipsIntel also announced new Xeon chips for servers Wednesday, as expected. Dual-processor models running at 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz cost $433 and $562, respectively, in quantities of 1,000. Intel also announced a 1.6GHz Xeon processor that will run at a lower voltage and therefore will consume less power and be better suited to small systems such as super-thin "blade" servers. It consumes an average of 30 watts of power, Maloney said, and costs $350 in large quantities.

In the fourth quarter of 2002, Intel will begin selling its new versions of its E7500 chipset, Code-named "Plumas," this collection of supporting chips connects a computer's main processors to the rest of the system, Current Plumas systems communicate with the processor that has a data-transfer pathway running at 400MHz, but future models will have a 533MHz speed, Fister, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platform Group, qualified Intel's position on the high-speed InfiniBand bear - yellow iphone case connection technology at the keynote address, Intel announced in May it had canceled plans to build InfiniBand chips..

Fister said Intel still is an advocate of InfiniBand, but that it's not likely to fulfill one of its earlier possible missions, connecting servers to storage systems. It mostly likely will be used to connect servers to each other, he said. "InfiniBand isn't dead everywhere, but it's clearly dead for storage," said Peter Glaskowsky, editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. "What InfiniBand has lost is its universal deployment vision of the past.". The chipmaker plans to make money off communications technology by lowering the cost and increasing the performance of optical networking.