Bios; Overview - Dell PowerEdge R910 Technical Manual

Dell

9 BIOS

9.1 Overview

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 BIOS is based on the Dell BIOS core, and supports the following features:
 ® ®
Intel Xeon E7-4800 and E7-8800 product family, and Intel Xeon processor 7500 series
support

Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support

CPU Turbo Mode support

PCI 2.3 compliant

Plug and Play 1.0a compliant

MP (Multiprocessor) 1.4 compliant

Boot from hard drive, optical drive, iSCSI drive, USB key, and SD card

ACPI support

Direct Media Interface (DMI) support

PXE and WOL support for on-board NICs

Memory mirroring and spare bank support

SETUP access through <F2> key at end of POST

USB 2.0 (USB boot code is 1.1 compliant)

F1/F2 error logging in CMOS

Virtual KVM, CD, and floppy support

Unified Server Configurator (UEFI 2.1) support

Power management support including DBS, Power Inventory and multiple Power Profiles
9.2 I2C
I2C is a simple bi-directional 2-wire bus for efficient inter-integrated circuit control. All I2C-bus
compatible devices incorporate an on-chip interface which allows them to communicate directly with
each other via the I2C-bus. These I2C devices perform communication functions between intelligent
control devices (e.g., microcontrollers), general-purpose circuits (e.g., LCD drivers, remote I/O
ports, memories) and application-oriented circuits.
The PE R910, BIOS accesses the I2C through the ICH10 (Intel I/O Controller Hub 10). There are two
MUX's on ICH10's I2C bus.

One MUX (U_ICH_SPD) controls the DIMM SPDs through four split segments

The other MUX (U_ICH_MAIN) controls the clock buffers, TOE, USB Hub through four split
segments.

BIOS controls both the MUX's through the two select lines using GPIO pins.
The Clock chip, USB hub, and the front panel EEPROM device addresses are located on the IOH I2C
bus.
Dell PowerEdge R910 Technical Guide 31