The company estimates that about one-third of the world's noncellular phone calls are completed over circuits that contain its chips.

Legerity expects to be the principle supplier of phone line chips to equipment makers who have won major contracts to revamp much of the phone equipment used in the United Kingdom. That four-year contract is expected to include the installation of 25 million new phone lines.

Legerity's corporate knowledge of the phone-equipment market goes back more than two decades to when the company was a division of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

AMD sold the telecom division to a West Coast investment firm, Francisco Partners Management LLC, in 2000.

"PathScale's InfiniPath technology takes full advantage of the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture, directly connecting I/O, memory and processors with open-standard HyperTransport(TM) technology," said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector for AMD (NYSE: AMD). "With over 20 AMD system partners now offering InfiniPath HTX adapters along with their AMD64 technology-based systems, there is clearly a strong market interest in this innovative new cluster interconnect solution."

InfiniPath leverages five important industry standards: HyperTransport, InfiniBand, OpenIB, MPICH and the AMD64 Direct Connect Architecture. InfiniPath connects to any standard InfiniBand 4X switch including those from Infinicon, TopSpin and Voltaire. InfiniPath will also support the OpenIB software stack providing full InfiniBand compliance. InfiniPath works with all AMD Opteron processors, but uniquely exploits Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers. InfiniPath implements a HyperTransport tunnel architecture enabling easier configurability on multiprocessor designs. With InfiniPath, applications deployed on Linux clusters can efficiently and reliably scale to thousands of nodes.

LINUX Professional 9.2 (a version of Linux based on the 2.6 kernel). It was immediately apparent that the 2.6-based SUSE product would deliver the highest throughput of the three.

Finally, the test would be performing FTP ?gets? and ?puts? so an FTP server had to be selected. Vsftpd is an FTP server that also supports the ?zero-copy? feature so it was chosen for the test.

The summary list of the server configuration is:
Tyan S4882 motherboard in a Tyan TX46 2U chassis
4 AMD Opteron 850 2.4 GHz CPU?s
8 DIMMs (2 per CPU) 512 MB per DIMM
DDR registered 400 MHz CL 2.5
3 Intel PRO 1000MT Dual Port Server
Adapters (6 gigabit ports total)
2 PCI-X busses
2 LAN cards (4 ports) on 100 MHz PCI-X bus
1 LAN card (2 ports) on 66 MHz PCI-X bus
36 gig SCSI disk
Novell SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2
Vsftpd FTP server

The team, which included folks from AMD (Quote, Chart), Cisco (Quote, Chart), Microsoft Research, Newisys, and S2io, transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes. It did so at a rate of 6.63 gigabits per second (define) between the CERN facility in Geneva, Switzerland, and Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., a distance of more than 15,766 kilometers, or approximately 9,800 miles.