QPI Is Cool (Part II)

For those of us who are working with the new Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) high speed bus, there is a new book on the market that will enhance your understanding as well as become the “Bible” for high speed buses. The name of the book is “Mastering High Performance Multiprocessor Signaling” by Dave Coleman and Michael Mirmak. ASSET’s ScanWorks® tools were referenced as one of the validation measurement tools for gathering data on receiver margining specification. Here are the book details...

If you’d like to get a copy of this book, it’s available for about $80 from www.amazon.com. To quote:

“Intel IBIST margining tools combine the best of the BER and the eye techniques by obtaining a relative electrical margin on the bus without actually touching the bus with any physical device.  These Intel IBIST margining tools have been developed jointly between Intel and ASSET InterTech, Inc. and are a product known as the ScanWorks IBIST Toolkit.

The ScanWorks IBIST Toolkit obtains the electrical margin data by using embedded registers in the receiving silicon itself to vary the electrical sampling thresholds of the receivers both in time and voltage while receiving a known pattern.”

Thanks Dave Colemen and Michael Mirmak for the reference. If you would like to learn more about ASSET ScanWorks IBIST tools, please come and meet with us at Intel’s Developers Forum in San Francisco on Sept. 13-15, 2010. Here’s the web link to register:  http://www.intel.com/idf

Hope to see you there!

Comments

[Alan Sguigna]

Just a note that this is a follow-up book to "Weaving High Performance Multiprocessor Fabric" by Maddox, Singh and Safranek from Intel Press which I referenced in my "QPI is Cool (Part I)" blog. Designers might want to have both books in their library. Also, a good course on QPI is available from Intel's training partner, MindShare (www.mindshare.com).