Architectural Overview Of The Hp Integrity Rx5670; Extensible Firmware Interface - HP rx2600 Overview

Architectural overview of the HP Integrity rx5670

The HP Integrity rx5670 supports one, two, three, or four Intel Itanium 2 processors linked to the zx1 memory and I/O
controller through a 200 MHz, double-pumped 128-bit system bus. Total bandwidth on the system bus is 6.4 GB/s.
Figure 10. The HP Integrity rx5670 supports up to four Intel Itanium 2 processors linked to the HP zx1 Chipset
The zx1 memory controller links to two independent 200 MHz, 6.4 GB/s memory buses. Each bus connects to six
zx1 scalable memory expanders, which in turn allocate bandwidth to the double data rate (DDR) SynchDRAM
memory DIMMs. Total DIMM capacity is 48 units, distributed over two 24 DIMM memory carrier boards, with
one board on each memory bus.
The server can operate with only one memory carrier board; however, this will only use one memory bus and,
therefore, only half of the available memory bandwidth. For maximum performance, the rx5670 should be
configured with both memory carrier boards, allowing full utilization of the rx5670's 12.8 GB/s total memory
bandwidth.
The I/O architecture consists of eight 0.5 GB/s channels allocated among eight zx1 I/O adapters. Each of these
eight adapters provides a PCI-X or PCI bus to the available I/O slots and core I/O devices. The first three I/O
channels connect to three independent 133 MHz PCI-X I/O slots, each with 0.5 GB/s of sustained throughput.
The next three I/O channels connect to three zx1 I/O adapters, each of which in turn connects to a pair of
66 MHz PCI-X I/O slots. Each slot-pair shares 0.5 GB/s of bandwidth.
The final two I/O channels connect to the core I/O. One channel provides 0.5 GB/s of bandwidth to the core
10/100/1000BT LAN as well as to one dual-channel Ultra160 SCSI controller. The other channel provides
0.5 GB/s of bandwidth to the core management LAN, RS-232 serial ports, another dual-channel Ultra160 SCSI
controller, and a 33 MHz PCI slot. The 33 MHz slot is ideal for the optional VGA/USB adapter (HP product
number A6869A). The VGA/USB card is automatically placed in this slot on systems that are factory-loaded
with Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Extensible firmware interface

The extensible firmware interface (EFI) is an interface between the HP-UX, Linux, and Windows operating systems
and the Itanium 2–based platform firmware. The file system supported by the extensible firmware interface is
based on the file allocation table (FAT) file system. EFI allows the use of FAT-32 for the system partition. (The
system partition is required on a bootable disk for the Itanium 2–based platform.)
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