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| Overall system balance is key to
staying technologically competitive in today's
high-performance open server platforms. The
ever-increasing processing power of Pentium® and
Pentium Pro processors has propelled server
performance, and made lagging I/O performance a
limiting factor. However, Intel’s i960® RP
I/O processor, and a new industry specification
for Intelligent I/O called I2O, brings I/O
performance up to par and provides better system
balance for high-performance servers. In conventional systems, the demands of I/O processing can create bottlenecks for both the host processor and PCI bus. Without the demands of handling I/O interrupts, the host processor can focus its clock cycles on more important application level processing. And if I/O traffic on the primary PCI bus is reduced, the result is more bandwidth available to move important data. Fortunately, this solution is available today. The i960 RP I/O processor is the first Intelligent I/O subsystem on a chip. I/O subsystems using Intel’s I/O processor can offload the demands of handling I/O interrupts from the host processor--meaning servers can scale-up to handle more users and process more transactions per second. In addition, users can have faster access to text, graphic, video and audio data. The i960 RP I/O processor is also the first processor to support the I2O specification created by the I2O Special Interest Group (SIG). Each i960 RP processor ships with a run-time license for Wind River System’s IxWorks* RTOS, so it can run software compliant with the I2O specification. The i960 RP I/O processor's high level of integration includes features such as a high-performance instruction execution core, a PCI-to-PCI bridge unit, two address translation units, private PCI devices, a secondary PCI bus arbitration unit, a three-channel DMA controller, an integrated memory controller, an I2C bus interface unit as well as an advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC) bus interface unit. It’s a complete I2O-spec compliant Intelligent I/O subsystem on a chip. So it’s an affordable, highly integrated chip that can speed the pace at which you can get your products to market. Here you can find out more about standardized Intelligent I/O via the I2O specification, the features and benefits of Intel’s i960 RP I/O processor and how you can use this new technology to improve your designs. |
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