AB297-60106: HPE HP PCI-Express IO Backplane Card with Cage for rx76-86 – AD161A

This PN provides one HP PCI-Express IO Backplane Card with Cage for rx76-86 - AD161A.

HP HP PCI-Express I/O Backplane Card with Cage for rx76/86, AD161A, (see note below) AD160A, AB297-60106

Part Number: AB297-60106

Alternate Part Number: AD161A

Description: PCI-Express I/O Backplane Card Cage

Compatible with:
- rx7640
- rx8640

The AB297-67006 has reached End of Life (EOL), the replacement is AB297-69006.

Note (difference between AD161A and AD160A)
The HP Integrity rx7640 Server supports both PCI X 2.0 and PCI Express. Two different backplanes are available. The PCI X 2.0 backplane (AB160A) supports sixteen (16) PCI X slots. A combination PCI Express/PCI X 2.0 backplane (AD161A) supports eight (8) PCI X slots and eight (8) PCI Express slots. AD161A is not supported as an upgrade to earlier rx7640 models configured with Intel Itanium Mad9M series processors.

Each backplane contains two master I/O controller chips located on the backplane. Each I/O controller contains sixteen high performance 12 bit wide links, which connect to sixteen slave I/O controller chips supporting the PCI X or PCI Express card slots and core I/O. Two links, one from each master controller is routed through the crossbar backplane and is dedicated to core I/O. The remaining thirty links are divided among the sixteen I/O card slots. This one card per link architecture leads to greater I/O performance and higher availability. Each controller chip is also directly linked to a host cell board. This means that at least two cell boards, located in cell slots 0 and 1, must be purchased in order to access all sixteen I/O card slots. With one cell board, access to eight slots is enabled.

Eight of sixteen I/O card slots are supported by dual high performance fat links. Each link is capable of ~2 GB/s of bandwidth. Six of the sixteen I/O card slots are supported by dual high-performance links. Each link is capable of providing 1060 of bandwidth. This means that half of HP Integrity rx7640 Server I/O slots are capable of sustained 2.12 GB/s. Aggregate I/O slot bandwidth is ~23 GB/s. In addition, because each I/O slot has a dedicated bus, any slot can be hot plugged or serviced without affecting other slots. The hot plug operation is very easy, and can be done with minimal training and effort.