STANDARDIZATION OF FUNCTIONAL TEST FOR IFF BASED SERVERS AND WORKSTATIONS

摘要

Historically, servers and workstations have been company and product line specific. Different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have developed products with different feature sets, different application software and even different operating systems. Servers and workstations are sources of pride for OEMs, as they require a great deal of technical investment to design and are often presented as the cutting edge of the OEM's technological capabilities. Significant investments in engineering effort and capital must be made in the development of the products' test and manufacturing processes for the products to be built. From an OEM's perspective, servers and workstations must have a higher than average return on investment (ROI) to help recoup the costs of designing them and their manufacturing processes. The introduction of the Intel Itanium Processor Family (IPF) will offer new opportunities in the server and workstation marketplace as OEMs consider moving from proprietary architectures to the Itanium processor architecture. Currently, there are about a dozen different processor architectures used for servers and workstations. Foreseeably, this number will drop, with Itanium being represented in many OEM's products. Along with reducing the number of different microprocessors available in the server and workstation markets, IPF will allow companies that have traditionally shied away from the server and workstation product segments to compete with the traditional server and workstation vendors. While these new competitors may not have the technical depth or the resources to make highly-customized products, they do boast experience in making low-cost products and marketing them effectively. Ironically, despite making servers and workstations more cost effective and standardized for high-end users, transitioning to IPF is considered to be "high risk" for OEMs due to the need for developing and qualifying manufacturing tests that will result in a high-reliability product at low costs. To encourage OEM acceptance of IPF along with independent software vendor (ISV) investment in IPF software development, high-efficiency, low start-up cost manufacturing and test processes must be made available. The manufacturing and test processes must have a strong base set of tests that are easily customized. The development of a standardized functional test for IPF based systems was started for many of the same reasons as IPF itself. Standardized IPF functional tests give OEMs and manufacturers a common platform that will reduce the costs and efforts associated with creating a functional test for product development and manufacturing.