One Stop Systems (OSS), a manufacturer of PCI Express technology, has announced a new MAX Express Dual Xeon System Host Board (SHB). Company President Steve Cooper says the new SHB is meant to expand One Stop's offerings "into single board computers ... supporting OEMs and integrators as well." The board, with the dual processors and no DRAM, starts at $4,675.
The following, quoted from the company announcement, describes the board's capabilities:
"The new SHB supports up to two 3.6GHz Xeon processors and features the Intel E7520 chipset, an 800MHz system bus, dual channel DDR2-400 memory interfaces, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual Serial ATA/150 ports, dual USB 2.0 ports with two additional USB 2.0 interfaces and an advanced Ultra XGA video port. It supports PCIe, PCI-X and PCI add-in cards, and provides quad USB ports, on-board video and other standard IO features."
Just to educate myself a little, I did some research and learned that PCI Express, originally called Third-Generation I/O (3GIO), is meant to speed up signal transfer to keep up with today's faster processors. PCI Express can support Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) transfer, making this (I assume) an important technology for voice and video transfer. The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia says PCI Express is designed as "a parallel interface of independently controlled serial links," or "lanes," up to 32 of them, each of which is "made up of two differential wire pairs that provide 2.5 Gbits/sec in each direction."
AB -- 2/22/06
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