Chapter 1: Introduction
1-6 Super I/O
The disk drive adapter functions of the Super I/O chip include a floppy disk drive controller that is compatible with industry standard 82077/765, a data separator, write pre-compensation circuitry, decode logic, data rate selection, a clock genera- tor, drive interface control logic and interrupt and DMA logic. The wide range of functions integrated onto the Super I/O greatly reduces the number of components required for interfacing with floppy disk drives. The Super I/O supports two 360 K, 720 K, 1.2 M, 1.44 M or 2.88 M disk drives and data transfer rates of 250 Kb/s, 500 Kb/s or 1 Mb/s.
It also provides two high-speed, 16550-compatible serial communication ports (UARTs). Each UART includes a 16-byte send/receive FIFO, a programmable baud rate generator, complete modem control capability and a processor interrupt sys- tem. Both UARTs provide legacy speed with baud rate of up to 115.2 Kbps as well as an advanced speed with baud rates of 250 K, 500 K, or 1 Mb/s, which support higher speed modems.
The Super I/O provides functions that comply with ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which includes support of legacy and ACPI power manage- ment through a SMI or SCI function pin. It also features auto power management to reduce power consumption.
1-7 iSCSI Support
The X8SIA/X8SIA-F motherboard supports the iSCSI Internet Protocol. iSCSI is an IP networking standard used to link and manage data storage, and transfer data across the internet and private intranets through long distance. iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet. It can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.
iSCSI allow clients to issue SCSI commands to remote SCSI storage devices and allow data centers to consolidate remote storage devices into storage arrays, giving an illusion of locally-attached disks to host servers. Unlike fiber-optic networks that require special cabling, iSCSI can run over long distance using existing networks.
For the X8SIA/X8SIA-F motherboard, iSCSI is supported on LAN 1. This can be enabled through the BIOS: Advanced => PCI/PnP Configuration => Onboard LAN1 Option ROM Select. Please see Chapter 4 for details.
