Sun Microsystems manual System Overview, About the Sun Fire 280R Server Hardware

C H A P T E R 1

System Overview

This chapter introduces you to the Sun Fire 280R server and explains some of its hardware and software features. The following information is covered in this chapter:

■“About the Sun Fire 280R Server Hardware” on page 1

■“About Front and Back Panel Features” on page 5

■“About the Sun Fire 280R Server Software” on page 11

About the Sun Fire 280R Server

Hardware

The Sun Fire 280R server is a high-performance, shared-memory, dual-processor multiprocessing system. The server is designed to use one or two of Sun’s UltraSPARC™ III CPU modules. Each UltraSPARC III CPU module implements the SPARC™ V-9 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the Visual Instruction Set (VIS) extensions that accelerate multimedia, networking, encryption, and Java™ processing. The UltraSPARC III CPU module also supports new pre-fetch instruction extensions to the VIS to speed overall system performance.

Processing power is provided by one or two UltraSPARC III CPU modules, each with up to 8 Mbytes of local high-speed external cache memory. The system bus synchronizes automatically to the clock rate of the installed CPUs, and operates at a clock rate that is a ratio of the speeds between CPU modules and the bus. For more information about CPU modules, see “About Central Processing Unit

(CPU) Modules” on page 83.

System main memory is provided by up to eight next generation dual inline memory modules (DIMMs), each of which is capable of storing 128, 256, 512, or 1024 Mbytes of data. Total main memory is expandable up to 8 Gbytes. To enhance

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