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raju Vegesna stubbornly refused to board the Intel-led bandwagon for the Rambus memory interface back in 1999, and the tough stance paid off. Vegesna's company, ServerWorks, netted a commanding market share in PC server chip sets when server makers also turned thumbs-down on Rambus, opting instead for synchronous DRAM.
Now Vegesna is digging in his heels again. He says he has done the math and decided against adopting the first generation of the PCI Express serial interconnect, which Intel Corp. is now driving for adoption in 2004. While the outcome for ServerWorks is unclear, Vegesna's stance reaffirms the independent and practical character of this EE-turned-CEO whose hard work and tough-mindedness have taken him from humble beginnings in India to head of a Silicon Valley company once valued at nearly $1 billion.
"I like to hire people who have strong opinions. He doesn't hesitate to let me know when he disagrees with me, and I like that," said Henry T. Nicholas, chief executive officer at Broadcom Corp., which acquired ServerWorks in January 2001 for $957 million in stock.
Yetto be seen is how top managers at Dell Computer, one of ServerWorks' major customers, will feel about Vegesna's decision on PCI Express, a technology Dell has told suppliers it wants to be the first to deploy. "The current version of PCI Express at 2.5 Gbits/second is not offering much for the server that PCI-X cannot do," said Vegesna, who is 40 years old. "At some point, Express could be ready for servers-maybe in the 5- or 10-- Gbit/s generation."
ServerWorks and Dell started "a frank discussion" on that issue in early July at a private industry meeting called by Dell. The results of such dialogues may set the course for how mainstream servers evolve over the next few years.
"We went through this whole serial-bus issue with Rambus," said Vegesna. "We performed the calculations and found PC-133 SDRAM was enough. It's the same exercise we are doing with PCI-X 2.0 now."
Back in 1999, many in the industry agreed with ServerWorks' math and decided that the Rambus equation did not add up. The company's chip set orders shot up while Intel, which supplies the majority of PC...
