PCI, SCSI, and Fibre Channel

The PCI standard had its origins in the PC world, and has supplanted the two earlier standard microprocessor backplane buses—VME and Multibus. VME is, however, still used in real-time systems and in some process control applications. It started as a 16-bit bus and later grew to 32 bits; for the most part, VME-based systems used Motorola 68000-family microprocessors.

Multibus I was also a 16-bit bus initially, but Multibus systems tended to house Intel processors. While Intel extended the definition of Multibus I to 32 bits as Multibus II, the new version never saw wide adoption and disappeared fairly quickly.

We can summarize PCI’s major characteristics as follows:

» Two data transfer widths—32 bits and 64-bits

» Two clock rates—33MHz and 66MHz

» Various available bandwidths (133, 266, and 532 MB/sec), depending on clock rate and data width, and with burst-mode transfers

» The ability to support both 32 and 64 controllers on the same bus

» The ability to automatically discover the configuration of devices on the bus at system initialization (known as Plug and Play; this avoids tedious parameter setting in control tables)

» The ability to plug in and remove controllers without stopping the system, a capability known as hot plug.

PCI offers—even in its slowest version—substantially higher throughput than the earlier buses (and higher than MCA and EISA, too, which offered 33MB/sec and 40MB/sec respectively).

The significantly greater demands of more recent technologies, such as Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel, have led to a proposal for a first extension to PCI, called PCI-X, with 32- or 64-bit data widths running at 66, 100 or 133MHz. The bandwidth of a 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X interface is 1064MB/sec. Along with the physical enhancements, the bus protocol has also been improved in order to enhance efficiency.

The capabilities have been further extended into PCI-X 2.0, whose specifications were approved early in 2002. The goals of PCI-X 2.0 may be summarized as:

» Meet performance needs with an interface capable of handling 64-bit data widths running at 266 or 533MHz and with a throughput of 2128 or 4256 MB/sec respectively

» Support the use of earlier-generation cards to protect earlier investments (of course, this simply means that old cards must work with the new bus; a PCI-X 2.0 system with a mix of cards meeting earlier specifications and cards meeting 2.0 specifications will run at the speed of the slowest card)

» Become an industry standard

» Integrate well with the InfiniBand initiative (see below)

These various buses all represent the classical way to connect up peripherals and controllers —New I/O Structures: InfiniBand—we will examine the limitations of the classical approach and show why a new I/O architectural approach is called for.

Source of Information : Elsevier Server Architectures 2005

PCI, SCSI, and Fibre Channel