Sun Microsystems SUN FIRE 280R - Manual (Page 29)

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C H A P T E R
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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