Technical Information 1-11
Plug and Play
The system comes with a Plug and Play BIOS which supports Plug and Play technology.
Plug and Play eliminates complicated setup procedures for installing Plug and Play
expansion boards. With Plug and Play, adding a Plug and Play expansion board is done by
turning off the system, installing the board, and turning on the system. There are no jumpers
to set and no system resource conflicts to resolve. Plug and Play automatically configures
the board.
ISA Bus
The system board uses the ISA bus for transferring data between the processor and I/O
peripherals and expansion boards. The ISA bus supports 16-bit data transfers and typically
operates at 8 MHz. ISA expansion slot connector pin assignments are provided in
Appendix A.
PCI Local Bus
The 32-bit PCI-bus is the primary I/O bus for the system. The PCI-bus is a highly-integrated
I/O interface that offers the highest performance local bus available for the Pentium Pro
processor. The bus supports burst modes that send large chunks of data across the bus,
allowing fast displays of high-resolution images.
The PCI-bus operates at half the Pentium Pro’s processor speed, and supports memory
transfer rates of up to 105 MB per second for reads and up to 120 MB per second for
writes, depending on processor configuration.
The high-bandwidth PCI-bus eliminates the data bottleneck found in traditional systems,
maintains maximum performance at high clock speeds, and provides a clear upgrade path to
future technologies.
PCI expansion slot connector pin assignments are provided in Appendix A.
PCI/IDE Ports
The system board provides two high-performance PCI/IDE ports: a primary channel and a
secondary channel. Each port supports up to two devices for a total of four IDE devices.
The primary PCI/IDE port has an enhanced IDE interface which supports PIO Mode 4
devices with 16 MB per second 32-bit wide data transfers on the high-performance PCI
local bus. The installed hard disk drive is connected to the primary PCI/IDE port. In
multimedia configurations, the installed CD-ROM reader is connected to the secondary
PCI/IDE port.
