I/O Slot Optimizations - HP Z640 Technical White Paper

Technical white paper | HP Z640 Workstation

I/O slot optimizations

The HP Z640 Workstation utilizes PCI-Express 3.0 technology. This section
provides guidance on optimizing the performance of your system when using
PCI-Express and PCI cards in the I/O slots.
Integrated PCI and PCI-Express 3.0
The HP Z640 provides one 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slot that can accommodate a full height, full length PCI card. The HP
Z640 uses the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 series, with integrated PCI-Express 3.0 controllers delivering a peak
bandwidth of 16 Gb/s per direction. PCI Express 3.0 is backward compatible with 1.0 and 2.0, and slots will train to the
highest common speed. PCI Express 3.0 slots will initialize at 1.0 and then transition to 3.0 through a training sequence
that involves four adaptive training phases. It is recommended to carefully evaluate and validate PCI-Express 3.0 devices
that are not available or supported from HP.
See Figure 1 in previous section for the HP Z640 Workstation Block Diagram
PCI-Express Performance
The HP Z640 integrates PCIe 3.0 controllers within the processor, DMA caching in the CPU, an integrated 4-channel
memory controller, PCIe 3.0 speeds, and a QPI bus speed up to 9.6 GT/s. This produces excellent performance in I/O
bandwidth, remote bandwidth, and latency.
Figure 2. x16 Peak Bandwidth per Direction—Gb/s
16
12
8
4
0
8
Gen 1.0 Gen 2.0 Gen 3.0