HP DL740 HP F8 Architecture Technology Brief - Page 3

HP F8 Architecture Specifically, the Profusion 8-way architecture has a bus bandwidth of 800 MB/s for the dedicated processor and I/O buses. The F8 architecture is capable of a bandwidth that is four times greater: 3.2 gigabytes per second (GB/s) for each processor bus and for the I/O subsystem (Figure 1). Figure 1. Bandwidth comparison between Profusion and F8 architectures >5XBaMnedmwoidrtyh to Memory... Aggregate Memory Bandwidth: 1.6 GB/s 3.2 GB/s Processor to Memory... Aggregate Memory Bandwidth: 8.5 GB/s Compaq F8 Chipset 3.2 GB/s Processor 3.2 GB/s 800 MB/s Processor Profusion Chipset 800 MB/s 800 MB/s Processor 4X ProcBeasnsdowr iadnthd I/O to I/O... to I/O... The Profusion architecture ensures fast access to memory by using an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s. This is enough to balance the maximum bandwidth of the two processor buses in the Profusion architecture. HP's F8 architecture ensures even faster memory access by using an aggregate memory bandwidth of 8.5 GB/s, which is 33 percent greater than the bandwidth of the two Xeon MP processor buses combined, and more than five times the Profusion memory bandwidth. In the F8 architecture, the total inputs to memory from the two processor buses and the I/O bus provide a cumulative maximum of 9.6 GB/s. The bandwidth to memory is 8.5 GB/s. Thus, the ratio of total inputs to memory to available memory bandwidth (8.5:9.6) approaches an ideal one-to-one ratio, ensuring good scalability for the 8-way multiprocessing system (Table 1). Table 1. Comparison of bandwidth ratios for the Profusion and F8 architectures architecture Profusion F8 memory bandwidth 1.6 GB/s 8.5 GB/s processor buses + I/O bus bandwidth (P1 + P2 + I/O) 2.4 GB/s 9.6 GB/s ratio of memory : processor + I/O 1.6 : 2.4 (0.67) 8.5 : 9.6 (0.89) 3