W
HITE
P
APER
(cont’d)
Compaq Professional Workstation - Key Technologies
3
Introduction
Compaq Professional Workstations are high performance workstations that provide exceptional
price/performance and scalability for technical and creative professional customers. Customer
market segments include:
•
Financial trading or analysis
•
Computer aided design (CAD)
•
Computer-aided engineering (CAE)
•
Digital content creation (DCC)
•
Electronic design automation (EDA)
•
Software development
•
Geographical information systems (GIS)
Compaq Professional Workstations offer customers the latest in useful technological innovation
to meet their needs today and in the challenging workstation environments of tomorrow, with
models designed for a variety of customers. This paper describes the key technologies for new
Compaq Professional Workstation AP550 and SP750 models.
Intel
840 Chipset
Compaq Professional Workstation AP550 and SP750 models incorporate the new Intel 840
chipset featuring Scalable Bandwidth Technology. The 840 chipset has been designed specifically
to meet the needs of high-performance workstation applications by providing new levels of
performance, scalability, and end user productivity. The Scalable Bandwidth Technology design
philosophy is similar in concept to an enhanced version of the Compaq Highly Parallel System
Architecture (HPSA) design implemented on the Compaq Professional Workstation SP700.
Scalable Bandwidth Features
•
Support for up to 4 GB of memory
•
AGP 4X providing 1 GB/s of available graphics bandwidth
•
800-MHz Direct Rambus memory support via two Rambus channels
for an aggregate
bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s
•
Dual-peer PCI buses to balance the I/O workload and performance
•
Dual SCSI bus channels to balance disk subsystem work load
•
1024 byte prefetch cache to reduce memory latency cycles. This cache reduces memory
latencies on applications that access memory sequentially.
•
64-bit PCI technology at 33 or 66 MHz enables high-speed drive and network connections
•
133-MHz system bus for maximum data transfer bandwidth of 1.07 GB/s on the front side
bus
The AP550 features what is referred to as the base implementation of the chipset, while the
SP750 features the full-featured implementation. The full-featured implementation has a slightly
more robust feature set with 64-bit/66 MHz PCI technology, dual channel SCSI bus, and support
for larger memory capacity.
