Itanium/sup TM/ Processor system bus design

This paper presents the design of the Itanium/sup TM/ Processors system bus interface achieving a peak data bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s in a glueless four-way multiprocessing system. A source-synchronous data bus with differential strobes enables this high bandwidth. Topics covered in this paper include optimization technique for the system topology, CPU package, signaling protocol, and I/O circuits. Highly accurate modeling and validation methodologies enable a good correlation of experimental results with simulation data.