"We are the only company we know of that is playing in this market," said Rick Shriner, president and chief executive officer of HotRail (San Jose, Calif.), a 50-person venture. "We're the only people who are even close to delivering something like this that will support the K7."

AMD is expected to launch the K7 within the month and is already delivering samples. The chip is widely expected to be the fastest available microprocessor through at least the end of the year. Shriner said his core logic will play an important role in securing K7 design wins in servers and workstations.

HotRail is using a switched-fabric architecture. Shriner said that servers using the architecture could perform up to 200 million transactions per second and that the internal channels move data at up to 3.2 Gbytes/second. By contrast, Intel's chip sets, according to Shriner, move data at 800 Mbytes/s and allow the processors to perform 33 million transactions per second.

"If you compare systems that use processors that are reasonably close in speed, a switched-fabric architecture can make one system clearly outperform another," Shriner said.

Intel's symmetric-multiprocessing efforts also allow eight chips to run in a single system. But George White, president of Intel subsidiary Corollary, has previously stated that his company does not expect to adopt a switched-fabric architecture for another four to five years.

HotRail's architecture will work with any processor, with minor tweaks. Shriner said Hot-Rail will likely work in the future to develop a product that supports Intel-architecture processors. He said Compaq Computer Corp., IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have expressed interest in the design.