Apple Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) - Manual (Page 12)

12 Technology Overview
Power Mac G5
Three expansion slots
In addition to the 16-lane graphics slot, the Power Mac G5 features three PCI Express
expansion slots: two four-lane slots and one eight-lane slot. Each slot uses a standard
connector that can accommodate a card of any size. This means a four-lane card works
perfectly in an eight-lane slot. If the card has more lanes than the slot, the card adjusts
to the bandwidth available and “downshifts” to that data rate.
With the high-bandwidth architecture in the new Power Mac G5, your system not
only will achieve faster performance today, but will be ready for future technologies
as well. For example, 10-gigabit networking technology, which can achieve up to
2.5 GBps of data throughput, will require an eight-lane slot. This promises to be an
ideal solution for working with uncompressed HD video, which demands over 120
MBps per individual stream—and far more in a multiple-stream or multiple-camera
environment.
Support for up to eight displays
Because both graphics and expansion slots use the same PCI Express standard, you
can install a PCI Express graphics card in any PCI Express slot. That means a single
Power Mac G5 can support four, six, or even eight displays with the addition of
multiple NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics cards.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet
Two independently confi gurable 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit) Ethernet interfaces
deliver tremendous networking bandwidth. Each Gigabit Ethernet controller in the
new Power Mac G5 supports jumbo frames (packets of up to 9000 bytes), reducing
system overhead and increasing throughput for all network activities. Virtual LAN tags
(VLAN 802.1q) allow the Power Mac G5 to join multiple virtual networks, with a unique
identifi cation for each one. And with Ethernet link aggregation in Mac OS X, you can
combine the bandwidth of the interfaces for doubled performance.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet delivers the massive throughput required for many professional
networking needs. You’ll be able to support an isolated management network that’s
independent of a client services network, work in a SAN environment that requires
independent networks for metadata and general networking, or provide the high-
speed network interconnect required in many cluster computing environments.
High-Performance I/O
The Power Mac G5 architecture uses the HyperTransport protocol to integrate I/O
subsystems and connect them to the system controller. Serial ATA, FireWire, USB,
audio, and wireless technologies are integrated through two bidirectional 800MHz
HyperTransport interconnects for a maximum throughput of 1.6 GBps, providing
ample throughput for a host of peripheral devices.
Serial ATA storage
Serial ATA is the industry-standard storage interface, replacing the Parallel ATA inter-
face. Designed to keep pace with the demands of digital video creation and editing,
audio storage and playback, and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA supports
1.5-Gbps throughput per channel (equivalent to a data rate of 150 MBps).
The Power Mac G5 can hold two internal 500GB Serial ATA drives for a total capacity
of 1TB of storage.
2 Each drive is on an independent bus, so there’s no competition for
drive performance as with Parallel ATA. Performance is improved even further when
drives are striped using software RAID in Mac OS X.
Each Power Mac G5 system includes
four PCI Express slots.