Apple M9592LL Technology Overview - Page 12

Each Power Mac G5 system includes four PCI Express slots. Technology Overview 12 Power Mac G5 Three expansion slots In addition to the 16-lane graphics slot, the Power Mac G5 features three PCI Express expansion slots: two four-lane slots and one eight-lane slot. Each slot uses a standard connector that can accommodate a card of any size. This means a four-lane card works perfectly in an eight-lane slot. If the card has more lanes than the slot, the card adjusts to the bandwidth available and "downshifts" to that data rate. With the high-bandwidth architecture in the new Power Mac G5, your system not only will achieve faster performance today, but will be ready for future technologies as well. For example, 10-gigabit networking technology, which can achieve up to 2.5 GBps of data throughput, will require an eight-lane slot. This promises to be an ideal solution for working with uncompressed HD video, which demands over 120 MBps per individual stream-and far more in a multiple-stream or multiple-camera environment. Support for up to eight displays Because both graphics and expansion slots use the same PCI Express standard, you can install a PCI Express graphics card in any PCI Express slot. That means a single Power Mac G5 can support four, six, or even eight displays with the addition of multiple NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics cards. Dual Gigabit Ethernet Two independently configurable 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit) Ethernet interfaces deliver tremendous networking bandwidth. Each Gigabit Ethernet controller in the new Power Mac G5 supports jumbo frames (packets of up to 9000 bytes), reducing system overhead and increasing throughput for all network activities. Virtual LAN tags (VLAN 802.1q) allow the Power Mac G5 to join multiple virtual networks, with a unique identification for each one. And with Ethernet link aggregation in Mac OS X, you can combine the bandwidth of the interfaces for doubled performance. Dual Gigabit Ethernet delivers the massive throughput required for many professional networking needs. You'll be able to support an isolated management network that's independent of a client services network, work in a SAN environment that requires independent networks for metadata and general networking, or provide the highspeed network interconnect required in many cluster computing environments. High-Performance I/O The Power Mac G5 architecture uses the HyperTransport protocol to integrate I/O subsystems and connect them to the system controller. Serial ATA, FireWire, USB, audio, and wireless technologies are integrated through two bidirectional 800MHz HyperTransport interconnects for a maximum throughput of 1.6 GBps, providing ample throughput for a host of peripheral devices. Serial ATA storage Serial ATA is the industry-standard storage interface, replacing the Parallel ATA interface. Designed to keep pace with the demands of digital video creation and editing, audio storage and playback, and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA supports 1.5-Gbps throughput per channel (equivalent to a data rate of 150 MBps). The Power Mac G5 can hold two internal 500GB Serial ATA drives for a total capacity of 1TB of storage.2 Each drive is on an independent bus, so there's no competition for drive performance as with Parallel ATA. Performance is improved even further when drives are striped using software RAID in Mac OS X.