Summary:PCI-X is the successor to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus Specification, the current standard that enables communication between peripheral devices and the computer processor. A major improvement over the older PCI technology, PCI-X enables significantly higher performance with transfer rates of up to 1.06 GB per second.
PCI-X System Architecture is a detailed and comprehensive guide to the PCI-X technology. It highlights the many changes and improvements from PCI 2.2 to PCI-X, so that you can build on your PCI knowledge to master PCI-X with greater ease. The book discusses the drawbacks of PCI and how PCI-X solves these problems, achieving faster transfer rates. In addition, it presents in-depth information and practical guidance on the PCI-X transaction protocol, device configuration for PCI-X, load tuning, PCI-X bridges, error detection and handling, and electrical issues. You will find specific information on such key topics as:
- Device types and bus initialization, including
- Hot-Plug PCI-X initialization
- Dword and burst commands
- Bus arbitration, latency rules, and burst transactions
- Transaction termination
- Split completion messages
- 64-bit transactions
- Bridge and non-bridge configuration registers
- Load tuning, including adjustable fields and registers, split completion buffers, and adjusting timeslice values
- PCI-X-to-PCI-X bridges
- Handling master abort, attribute phase parity errors, and split read errors
