2
INTRODUCTION
This mainboard is designed for the new generation CPU. It supports the Intel
CPU SLOT1 (Pentium
®
II), up to 512MB of memory, super I/O, and Green
PC functions. The mainboard provides high performance for the server
system and meets the requirements of the desktop system for multimedia in
the future.
This mainboard based on the new 440BX chipset which revolutionizes the
way Pentium® II PCs use memory by employing an Open Page Architecture,
a new memory architecture that lets the CPU access main memory faster.
Essentially, this means the CPU can leave a virtual finger in up to 32 different
pages of its memory, making it easy for you to flip back to any of them at any
time. Currently, like a dogged A-to-Z reader of the encyclopedia, a Pentium II
can only keep its memory open to one page at a time. The CPU uses pages
of memory in a similar manner to people leafing through reference works. It
wants to flip back and forth between a particular set of pages at a time.
Flipping right to them instead of taking that extra microsecond to find them
makes the whole PC runs faster.
Another improvement in the chipset helps the CPU when it finds a single-bit
error while reading error-correcting memory (that is, one bit in a byte of
information is incorrect). With the 440BX, the error can be corrected on the
fly, with the correction written back into memory. Curr
ent Pentium® IIs can’t
write the correction back.
However, this mainboard offers more obvious improvements. Most
importantly, support for the faster system bus will have a profound effect on
performance.
But other performance benefits accrue for mainstre am desktops as well. The
most obvious of these is support for 2x AGP. This means the AGP bus is
clocked twice as fast and Sideband channel (a slower side channel for control
information) is also used. Current AGP implementations only use a single -
speed main channel and mix control information with the data.
1998 Jaton Corporation, USA
