- 64-Lane, 16-Port switch
- PCI Express generation 3 switching over CompactPCI Serial
- 1 GB/s per lane for each point-to-point serial link
- Programmable configuration of PCIe ports according to backplane design
- Software tools for diagnostics and performance monitoring
- Multicast / broadcast capability
From Point to Point with High Speed PCI Express
While the CompactPCI Serial standard offers per se a full mesh communication via Ethernet on the backplane, the switch board GX1 enables the same advantages also for PCIe-based connections.
GX1 is a high-end switch fabric for the system slot, which supports both multi-root and multi-host configuration. While with multi-root up to three CPU boards with their proprietary peripheral cards can be addressed, in the multi-host configuration all end-point (CPU and/or peripheral) are communicating flexibly with each other.
The latter is especially suited for performance intensive applications with changing tasks, like for example for building a supercomputer or for the data-intensive image processing within a MRT (magnetic resonance tomography).
Perfect playmates for GX1 could be the multicore CPU cards G25A (Intel Xeon D) and G52A (Freescale QorIQ) from MEN, which support PCIe 3.0 via the backplane just like the GX1 and have been developed especially for networking systems with high demands of data transfer rates and computing performance.
The 64 lanes of the GX1 can transmit their data with 1 GB/s per lane.
Thanks to an application software in the root complex of GX1, the switch ports of the CompactPCI Serial card can be configured individually and therefore adapted to different backplane designs.
Together with software tools for monitoring and diagnosis the GX1 becomes a reliable and high-capacity switching component for fast and serial point-to-point communication via PCIe 3.0.
