Compaq Highly Parallel; System Architecture - Compaq 6000 Supplementary Manual

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HITE APER
(cont' d)
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C
O M P A Q H I G H L Y
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The Compaq Professional Workstation 6000 has been designed with a Highly Parallel System
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Architecture that maximizes system bandwidth to improve performance in demanding
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applications. Most workstations in the Intel based Windows NT market support two CPUs to
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process instructions concurrently. However, overall system bandwidth is limited since each
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CPU must compete for access to critical subsystems such as memory and I/O whose bandwidth
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has not been correspondingly increased.
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The Highly Parallel System Architecture used with the Compaq Professional Workstation 6000
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addresses the need for greater overall system bandwidth by using dual memory controllers, dual-
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. . peer PCI buses, and advanced multiprocessing support.
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Diagram 1: The Compaq Highly Parallel System Architecture.
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Dual Memory Controllers
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The Compaq Professional Workstation 6000 uses dual memory controllers that can process
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memory requests in parallel, significantly increasing overall memory bandwidth. Other
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workstations in the Intel based Windows NT market offer memory bandwidth of either
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267MB/second or 533MB/second depending on the chipset used. The Compaq Professional
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Workstation 6000 uses two memory controllers, each with a bandwidth of 533MB/second.
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Therefore, total memory bandwidth increases to 1.07GB/second- two to four times that of other
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systems.
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Diagram 2: Dual Memory Controllers Architecture.
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A R A L L E L Y S T E M
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Compaq Workstations - Key Technologies
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R C H I T E C T U R E