Intel® 41210 Serial to Parallel PCI Bridge Developer’s Manual 51
Transaction Ordering
Transaction Ordering 6
The Intel® 41210 Serial to Parallel PCI Bridge (called hereafter the 41210 Bridge or 41210)
follows the producer-consumer model of a standard PCI Express*-to-PCI bridge. Based on this
model, the 41210 implements a set of ordering rules in the upstream and downstream directions.
The ordering plane covered by these rules spans the transaction domain covered by PCI Express*
and either of the two PCI segments. The 41210 uses a single PCI Express* virtual channel, for both
PCI segments.
Accesses to the internal 41210 configuration registers follow no ordering relationship with respect
to transactions moving to and from PCI and PCI Express* buses. This means that upstream
memory and configuration reads and writes (when enabled via the BINIT register) are completed
out of order with the transactions pending in the 41210 upstream queues towards PCI Express*.
Downstream memory/configuration transactions to the internal register space can complete out of
order with respect to transactions pending in the downstream queues towards PCI. Software must
be aware that any semaphore mechanism implemented through the internal 41210 register space
requires a dummy read to the PCI or PCI Express* space to push the writes that are pending in the
41210 queues in either direction. The ordering tables in the next two sections do not consider these
transactions.

6.1 Upstream Transaction Ordering

Tabl e 21 lists the combined set of ordering rules in the upstream path of the 41210 for PCI
transactions.
Table 21. Upstream Transaction Ordering
Row Pass Column Posted Write Delayed/Split Read
Request Delayed/Split Read
Completion Delayed/Split Write
Completion
Posted write No Yes No No
Delayed/split read request No Yes1Yes No
Delayed/split write request No Yes Yes No
Delayed/split read completion No Yes Yes No
Delayed/split write completion No Yes Yes No
NOTE:
1. Subsequent requests only (prefetches). All upstream initial requests are in order.