Installation guide

4 IBM Eserver xSeries 366 Technical Introduction
Figure 3 xSeries 366 system block diagram
Each memory port out of the memory controller has a peak throughput of 5.33 GBps. DIMMs
are installed in matched pairs (that is, two-way interleaving) to ensure that the memory port is
fully utilized. Peak throughput for each PC2-3200 DDR2 DIMM is 2.67 GBps. (The DIMMs are
run at 333 MHz to remain in sync with the throughput of the front-side bus.)
In addition, there are four memory ports; spreading installed DIMMs across all four memory
ports can improve performance, because the four independent memory ports (memory cards)
provide simultaneous/concurrent access to memory. With four memory cards installed (and
DIMMs in each card), peak memory bandwidth is 21.33 GBps.
The memory controller routes all traffic from the four memory ports, two CPU ports and the
two PCI bridge ports. The memory controller also has embedded DRAM, which in the x366
holds a snoop filter lookup table. This filter ensures that snoop requests for cache lines go to
the appropriate CPU bus and not both of them, thereby improving performance.
One PCI bridge supplies four of the six 64-bit 266 MHz PCI-X slots on four independent
PCI-X buses. The other PCI bridge supplies the other two PCI-X slots (also 64-bit, 266 MHz),
plus all the onboard PCI devices, including the optional ServeRAID-8i and Remote
Supervisor Adapter II SlimLine daughter cards.
Figure 4 on page 5 shows the rear panel of the x366.
66
Six PCI-X 2.0 slots:
64-bit 266 MHz
Hurricane
IBM XA-64e
core chipset
CPU 2 CPU 3
654
DDR2
SMI2
DDR2
SMI2
DDR2
SMI2
DDR2
SMI2
CPU 1 CPU 4
Memory
controller
3
21
HDD
backplane
Adaptec
SAS
Gigabit
Ethernet
ServeRAID
266 MHz266 MHz266
33
South
bridge
EIDE
RSA SL
Each:
667 MHz
5.33 GBps
667 MHz
5.33 GBps
6 GBps
667 MHz
5.33 GBps
Calgary
PCI-X bridgePCI-X bridge
USB 2.0
Video
6 GBps
6 GBps
Serial
K/M