whats is cell board

[Vipal]

hello....

i am new to itanium concept...

Could you plz explain..what is cell board??

What is difference between cell based processor & normal processor???

[mvpel]

I found this documentation to be very informative. It's particular to a certain type of system, the Superdome, but the basic concepts of cells and hardware partitions are there for you regardless of the specific platform.

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90702/ch01s02.html

Each Superdome server is composed of the following elements:

* Cells

Each cell provides processors and memory, and optionally is connected to an I/O chassis residing in the same cabinet.

Up to 4 processors and 32 DIMMs can be installed in each cell.

[Torsten.]

Taken from the (old) superdome (1) quickspecs:

...
A cell, or cell board, is the basic building block of a Superdome system. It is a symmetric multi processor (SMP), containing up to four processor modules and up to 16 GB of main memory using 512-MB DIMMs (sx1000 only) in 32 memory slots, up to 32 GB of main memory using 1 GB DIMMs, up to 64 GB of main memory using 2 GB DIMMs, and up to 128 GB of main memory using 4-GB DIMMS (sx2000 only). It is also possible to mix DIMM sizes on the same cell board. A connection to a 12 slot PCI X card cage is optional for each cell. Each hard partition must be connected to at least one PCI-X I/O card cage.

The Superdome cell boards shipped from the factory are offered with 1, 2, 3, or 4 processors.

The Superdome cell board contains:

- sx2000: Intel Itanium 9000 or 9100 series processor modules (up to 4 processor modules for a total of 8 cores) or Itanium 1.6 GHz processors (up to 4 processor modules for a total of 4 cores)
- Cell controller ASIC (application specific integrated circuit)
- Main memory DIMMs installed in groups of eight
- Voltage Regulator Modules (VRM)
- Data buses
- Optional link to 12 PCI X I/O slots