Switched fabric eliminates CPU-bus bottlenecks
By Warren Webb -- EDN, February 20, 2003
The new C269 Equinox from General Micro Systems is a hot-swappable industrial CompactPCI CPU board based on Intel's new Xeon-LP Pentium IV processor (Picture). Featuring dual 3-GHz Xeon-LP CPUs, the C269 includes ServerWorks' new Hub-Link controller, which gives the CPUs high-speed access to memory, mass storage, I/O, multimedia, and networking subsystems. The C269's Hub-Link controller uses a four-port switched fabric to eliminate the bottlenecks of traditional PCI-local-bus architectures. Instead of providing arbitrated access to a shared-bus resource, the Hub-Link controller provides dedicated point-to-point connections between the CPUs and the key subsystems, each operating at 2.4 Gbytes/sec.
Equinox also provides a full complement of standard desktop interfaces, including keyboard, mouse, and floppy; two COM ports; and six USB ports. The C269's dual-mode display controller supports both analog RGB and flat-panel displays. Equinox provides two 10/100/1000 BaseTX Gigabit Ethernet channels, which you can configure as a PICMG 2.16 Ethernet packet-switched backplane. Equinox also provides a third 10/100 BaseTX Ethernet interface for use as an external debugging or controller interface. Software support for the Equinox C269 includes Windows 2000, Solaris x86, Linux, QNX, and VxWorks. The Equinox C269 with a 1.6-GHz Xeon-LP CPU and 256 Mbytes of RAM costs $2400 (one).
General Micro Systems, 1-909-980-4863, www.gms4sbc.com.
