HP Professional sp750 Compaq Professional Workstation SP750 and AP550 Key Tech - Page 3

WHITE PAPER (cont'd) Compaq Professional Workstation - Key Technologies Introduction Compaq Professional Workstations are high performance workstations that provide exceptional price/performance and scalability for technical and creative professional customers. Customer market segments include: • Financial trading or analysis • Computer aided design (CAD) • Computer-aided engineering (CAE) • Digital content creation (DCC) • Electronic design automation (EDA) • Software development • Geographical information systems (GIS) Compaq Professional Workstations offer customers the latest in useful technological innovation to meet their needs today and in the challenging workstation environments of tomorrow, with models designed for a variety of customers. This paper describes the key technologies for new Compaq Professional Workstation AP550 and SP750 models. Intel® 840 Chipset Compaq Professional Workstation AP550 and SP750 models incorporate the new Intel 840 chipset featuring Scalable Bandwidth Technology. The 840 chipset has been designed specifically to meet the needs of high-performance workstation applications by providing new levels of performance, scalability, and end user productivity. The Scalable Bandwidth Technology design philosophy is similar in concept to an enhanced version of the Compaq Highly Parallel System Architecture (HPSA) design implemented on the Compaq Professional Workstation SP700. Scalable Bandwidth Features • Support for up to 4 GB of memory • AGP 4X providing 1 GB/s of available graphics bandwidth • 800-MHz Direct Rambus memory support via two Rambus channels for an aggregate bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s • Dual-peer PCI buses to balance the I/O workload and performance • Dual SCSI bus channels to balance disk subsystem work load • 1024 byte prefetch cache to reduce memory latency cycles. This cache reduces memory latencies on applications that access memory sequentially. • 64-bit PCI technology at 33 or 66 MHz enables high-speed drive and network connections • 133-MHz system bus for maximum data transfer bandwidth of 1.07 GB/s on the front side bus The AP550 features what is referred to as the base implementation of the chipset, while the SP750 features the full-featured implementation. The full-featured implementation has a slightly more robust feature set with 64-bit/66 MHz PCI technology, dual channel SCSI bus, and support for larger memory capacity. 3