The Pentium 4 processor was originally designed to operate with 2 RDRAM channels with 3.2GB/sec combined memory bandwidth. But the high cost of RDRAM in relation to other DRAM types resulted in demand for a chipset supporting SDRAM and DDR memory. The original Intel 845 chipset supported PC100 SDRAM and a follow-on chipset supported DDR. To allow low cost desktop platforms, the 845 has only a single 64-bit memory channel, rather than two 64-bit memory channels, which would allow 200/266MHz DDR memory to match the 400/533MHz Pentium 4 FSB in bandwidth. Intel publishes performance results for Pentium 4 systems with the 850 RDRAM-based chipset, but not with any of the 845 SDRAM or DDR chipsets. Presumably the 850 chipset has better performance.
The 845E Memory Controller Hub has an 8-bit 66MHz quad-pumped point-to-point Hub Interface (HI) to the I/O Controller Hub (ICH) with 266MB/sec bandwidth. The ICH supports one 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, two IDE/ATA 100 channels, USB ports and other low-bandwidth legacy devices. The 32-bit/33MHz 133MB/sec PCI is somewhat inadequate for a server platform with such a powerful processor. The older generation 440BX/GX chipset was offered with an AGP-to-PCI bridge chip, allowing one 64-bit/66MHz PCI bus to be operated from the AGP port. This might still be possible with the 845E chipset, but no systems offer this capability.
Figure 7 below shows the ServerWorks GC-LE chipset for a dual processor Xeon system. The Xeon processor has the Pentium 4 core in a 603-pin socket that allows multiprocessor configurations and with Hyper-Threading capability enabled. The memory bandwidth matches the system bus bandwidth, but the more important point is that the memory is 2-way interleaved. The IMB (3.2GB/sec) has more bandwidth than the maximum combined bandwidth of the two PCI-X busses (1GB/sec) on each CIOB-X. This reflects the current signaling capability of a point-to-point link rather than a required design feature.
Figure 7. ServerWorks GC-LE chipset.
Figure 8 below shows the ServerWorks GC-SL chipset, with a single DDR memory channel and a single IMB bus for two PCI-X busses. This allows for lower cost system with still considerable I/O bus bandwidth.
The advances from the ServerWorks HE-SL to the GC-LE chipset are substantial increases in system, memory and I/O bandwidth. The memory subsystem changed from SDRAM to DDR to support twice the data bandwidth for the same data path width. On the I/O side, the IMB bandwidth increased from 1GB/sec to 3.2GB/sec and the 64-bit 66MHz PCI busses changed to 64-bit 100/133MHz PCI-X busses. The GC-SL chipset gives up 2-way interleaved memory for a single DDR channel but still has much better I/O capability than the Intel 845E desktop chipset.
Figure 8. ServerWorks GC-SL chipset.
Figure 9 below shows the Intel E7500 chipset for dual processor Xeon systems. The E7500 chipset is comprised of one MCH, up to 3 P64H2’s and one ICH. The E7500 MCH interfaces the system bus, 2 72-bit (64-bit data, 8-bit ECC) DDR channels, 3 Hub Interface 2.0 connections and 1 HI 1.5 connection. The HI 2.0 connection is 16-bit wide, and has 66MHz clock with 8X data transfer for a total bandwidth of 1.066GB/sec. Each P64H2 device can support 2 64-bit PCI-X busses.
Figure 9. Intel E7500 chipset.
It might seem the HI 2.0 connection, with 1.066GB/sec bandwidth, is a potential bottleneck when each PCI-X bus is running at 100 or 133MHz with a bandwidth of 800MB/sec or 1GB/sec. This is actually not a significant issue. The older generation 33MHz PCI bus was frequently configured with 4 or more slots. It certainly seems reasonable that a higher frequency bus can support at least the same number slots, even taking into account the higher bandwidth requirements of individual adapters. However, even the improved signaling capability in PCI-X allows only 2 slots at 100MHz and 1 slot at 133MHz. One solution is to create two electrically independent busses, even if the uplink bandwidth is only that of single bus. This allows either 4 100MHz or 2 133MHz PCI-X slots on each P64H2. The full 3GB/sec bandwidth is not even a firm requirement at the system level as Intel’s own motherboard for the E7500 chipset only implements 2 of the 6 possible PCI-X busses on just 1 P64H2 and one 32-bit PCI bus on the ICH.