HP Professional 5100 Highly Parallel System Architecture for Compaq Profession - Page 3

ECG066/1198 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF (cont.) ... INTRODUCTION Achieving greater system bandwidth is a critical issue to businesses running applications for such demanding tasks as financial analysis, computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), and digital content creation (DCC). As a technology leader, Compaq anticipated the growing need for increased bandwidth and pursued possible solutions. As a result of its R&D efforts, Compaq is one of the first computer companies to implement a unique new architecture that provides the greatest bandwidth possible today for X86 systems running such demanding applications under the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. The high bandwidth results from a highly parallel system architecture design. The Highly Parallel System Architecture consists of parallel processors, parallel memory controllers, and parallel input/output (I/O). This new architecture is based on high-performance Intel Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors along with the memory and I/O subsystems that support them. It includes a new standards-based memory architecture that provides significantly greater bandwidth than traditional memory architectures by using dual memory controllers. These memory controllers independently process memory requests in parallel, thereby effectively doubling the memory bandwidth of traditional architectures. The new architecture also supports dual-peer PCI buses that double I/O bandwidth and allow for more I/O expandability. The new architecture is being implemented initially in two Compaq products, the Compaq Professional Workstation 6000 and the Compaq Professional Workstation 8000. This technology brief provides an overview of the new architecture and explains how it differs from other architectures used in X86 systems. ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW Unlike any previous architecture used in X86 systems, the new architecture being implemented by Compaq incorporates a highly parallel system design. As the block diagram in Figure 1 indicates, the new architecture offers parallelism in multiple ways. It supports symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with up to four Pentium Pro processors or two Pentium II processors. It supports dual-peer PCI buses to provide an aggregate PCI bus bandwidth of up to 267 MB/s. It also features dual memory controllers that deliver a peak aggregate memory bandwidth of 1.07 GB/s. This high degree of hardware parallelism for critical subsystems such as processor, memory, and I/O maximizes system bandwidth to improve performance in demanding, resource-intensive applications. Hardware parallelism of this architecture can be increased even more if the system configuration includes an optional Compaq drive array controller that can increase performance in disk-bound applications by accessing data in parallel from multiple disk drives. ADVANCED SMP It is widely recognized that SMP has been supported on both RISC/UNIX workstations and servers for a number of years. Most people do not, however, associate Microsoft Windows NT Workstation and the applications that run on it with SMP. Windows NT Workstation does support SMP; and for running many demanding applications in finance, computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering, and digital content creation, workstation users can reap the benefits of SMP. Many simulations and analyses performed on workstations in technical computing environments require tremendous numbers of calculations that can take hours or even days to complete. Fortunately, many of these applications are multi-threaded or otherwise lend themselves well to multiprocessing. Therefore, a single user of a workstation can take full advantage of multiple processors. 3