Chapter 2 Learning Check

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1:

Define the term chipset.

A1:

Answer: A chipset is a collection of the microchips on a server motherboard that control the features and the functions of the motherboard. The chipset determines how much memory can be installed, which processors can be used, and which types of interfaces the computer can support.

2:

What are the two main performance bottlenecks in the original PC chipset?

A2:

Answer:

  1. Only one device could use the system bus at a time.

  2. All bus transfers, both system and I/O, were restricted to the same bus speed.

3:

What was the main benefit of the dual independent bus architecture? Where was the bottleneck with this architecture?

A3:

Answer: This design allowed the memory bus between the processor and memory to operate at a higher speed than that of the I/O expansion bus. The bottleneck was the I/O bridge.

4:

What server subsystem was the point of contention with bus mastering technology?

A4:

Answer: Memory

5:

What were the three main functions of the memory and I/O (MIOC) technology?

A5:

Answer:

  1. Bus arbitration

  2. Timing

  3. Buffering between the processor, memory, and I/O

6:

Which system architecture first provided peripherals with independent access to processors and memory?

A6:

Answer: Parallel I/O bus architecture

7:

Which architecture provided dual-peer PCI buses and employed dual memory controllers that processed memory requests in parallel?

A7:

Answer: Highly Parallel System Architecture

8:

What innovation enabled each of the five main ports to transfer data at high speed to each of the other ports, allowing concurrent read/writes between processors, memory, and I/O?

A8:

Answer: Crossbar switch

9:

What chipset uses a two-port (bus) memory design with 1.6GB/s memory bandwidth (2 x 800MB/s), allowing simultaneous access to memory on both ports?

A9:

Answer: ProFusion

10:

What three advantages does the F8 chipset have over the NUMA architecture?

A10:

Answer:

  1. Eliminates potential bottlenecks by using very high bandwidths to match the processing power of the Xeon MP processor

  2. Eliminates potential bottlenecks using optimized crossbar switch capabilities

  3. Expands online replacement capabilities to include Hot Plug RAID Memory

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    HP ProLiant Servers AIS. Official Study Guide and Desk Reference
    HP ProLiant Servers AIS: Official Study Guide and Desk Reference
    ISBN: 0131467174
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2004
    Pages: 278

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