Sun X4100 0915ALEB30-HD 0915ALEB30 User Manual
Product codes
0915ALEB30
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Figure 2-3: Intel vs. Opteron Architectures
I/O Expansion Capability to High-Speed Industry Buses
The traditional Northbridge/Southbridge architecture is not intended to support more than two core-logic elements. Adding addi-
tional high-speed functionality (such as Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-E, the InfiniBand Architecture, or any combination thereof) would have
to occur in one of three ways:
• The functionality would have to be attached to an existing bus interface such as the PCI bus. However, an existing bus may
not have sufficient bandwidth to support high-speed technologies, especially in instances in which multiple buses or
combinations of buses must be supported simultaneously.
• The functionality would have to be directly attached to the higher speed proprietary chip-to-chip interconnect bus via a
bridging device. However, the proprietary nature of this solution may limit the number of components available from
vendors, thus impacting cost and availability.
• The functionality would have to be integrated into one of the core logic components. This solution is the least flexible, as a
wide range of components would have to be created for each desired combination of feature-set buses.
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DDR2
10.7 GB/s
DDR2
10.7 GB/s
FSB
FSB
CPU
CPU
CPU
CPU
MCH
(Northbridge)
ESB-2
(Southbridge)
HT
8 GB/s
HT
8 GB/s
HT
8 GB/s
HT
8 GB/s
CPU
CPU
CPU
CPU
I/O
I/O
FBDIMM
Intel Architecture
Sun Fire X4100 M2 / X4200 M2