QuickRing

Last updated

QuickRing was a gigabit-rate interconnect that combined the functions of a computer bus and a network. It was designed at Apple Computer as a multimedia system to run "on top" of existing local bus systems inside a computer, but was later taken over by National Semiconductor and repositioned as an interconnect for parallel computing. It appears to have seen little use in either role, and is no longer being actively worked on. However it appears to have been an inspiration for other more recent technologies, such as HyperTransport.

Computer network collection of autonomous computers interconnected by a single technology

devices that originate, route and terminate the data are called network nodes. Nodes are generally identified by network addresses, and can include hosts such as personal computers, phones, and servers, as well as networking hardware such as routers and switches. Two such devices can be said to be networked together when one device is able to exchange information with the other device, whether or not they have a direct connection to each other. In most cases, application-specific communications protocols are layered over other more general communications protocols. This formidable collection of information technology requires skilled network management to keep it all running reliably.

In computer architecture, a local bus is a computer bus that connects directly, or almost directly, from the CPU to one or more slots on the expansion bus. The significance of direct connection to the CPU is avoiding the bottleneck created by the expansion bus, thus providing fast throughput. There are several local buses built into various types of computers to increase the speed of data transfer. Local buses for expanded memory and video boards are the most common.

National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, United States. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.

Contents

History

QuickRing started as an offshoot of the fabled Futurebus project, which started in the late 1970s under the aegis of the IEEE. The Futurebus process quickly bogged down, and concluding it was doomed, several of the main designers left the effort in 1987 to try again on smaller projects, leading to both QuickRing and SCI. [1] In the case of QuickRing the main proponent was Paul Sweazey of National Semiconductor, who had hosted Futurebus's cache coherency group. Sweazey left National Semiconductor and moved to Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, where the new system was developed.

Futurebus, or 'IEEE 896, is a computer bus standard, intended to replace all local bus connections in a computer, including the CPU, memory, plug-in cards and even, to some extent, LAN links between machines. The effort started in 1979 and didn't complete until 1987, and then immediately went into a redesign that lasted until 1994. By this point, implementation of a chip-set based on the standard lacked industry leadership. It has seen little real-world use, although custom implementations continue to be designed and used throughout industry.

The system was first announced publicly at the 1992 Worldwide Developers Conference, positioned primarily as a secondary bus for computer systems to carry multiple streams of digital video without using the existing backplane bus. [2] Apple was particularly interested in this role due to the limitations of their current NuBus systems in terms of speed. They envisioned various video cards using a second connector located near the top of the card, opposite the NuBus connector on the bottom, to talk to each other. Optionally, one of the cards would produce compressed output, which could be sent over the NuBus for storage or display. Before any commercial use of QuickRing, newer versions of PCI started appearing that offered performance close enough to QuickRing to make its role redundant. Apple switched to an all-PCI based computer lineup starting in 1995, and in one of their general downsizings in the early 90s, Apple dropped their funding for QuickRing.

Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images with analog signals. Digital video comprises a series of digital images displayed in rapid succession.

Backplane

A backplane is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete computer system. Backplanes commonly use a printed circuit board, but wire-wrapped backplanes have also been used in minicomputers and high-reliability applications.

NuBus

NuBus is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus was done by Western Digital for their NuMachine, and for the Lisp Machines Inc. LMI Lambda. The NuBus was later incorporated in Lisp products by Texas Instruments (Explorer), and used as the main expansion bus by Apple Computer and NeXT. It is no longer widely used outside the embedded market.

Sweazey moved back to National Semiconductor, who positioned QuickRing as a high-speed interconnect. Here it had little better luck, competing against SCI on one hand, and ever-faster versions of Ethernet on the other. Efforts were made to standardize QuickRing inside the existing VMEbus system using some redundant pins in response to an industry effort to standardize parallel processing hardware, but nothing ever came of this. The US Navy announced several tenders for QuickRing products for sonar data processing (for which they had originally had Futurebus+ developed), but it is unclear whether or not it was actually used in this role. National eventually lost interest, and the system essentially disappeared in 1996. Similar products, notably SKYconnect and Raceway, were also standardized in this role, but seem to have seen little use as well.

Ethernet computer networking technology

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3, and has since retained a good deal of backward compatibility and been refined to support higher bit rates and longer link distances. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET.

VMEbus

VMEbus is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. It is physically based on Eurocard sizes, mechanicals and connectors, but uses its own signalling system, which Eurocard does not define. It was first developed in 1981 and continues to see widespread use today.

Sonar technique that uses sound propagation

Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation to navigate, communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of the water, such as other vessels. Two types of technology share the name "sonar": passive sonar is essentially listening for the sound made by vessels; active sonar is emitting pulses of sounds and listening for echoes. Sonar may be used as a means of acoustic location and of measurement of the echo characteristics of "targets" in the water. Acoustic location in air was used before the introduction of radar. Sonar may also be used in air for robot navigation, and SODAR is used for atmospheric investigations. The term sonar is also used for the equipment used to generate and receive the sound. The acoustic frequencies used in sonar systems vary from very low (infrasonic) to extremely high (ultrasonic). The study of underwater sound is known as underwater acoustics or hydroacoustics.

Description

The basic QuickRing system consisted of a number of single-direction 1-bit serial links carrying data, and one extra line carrying a 50 MHz clock signal. Apple's implementation consisted of six data lines and the clock line using twisted-pair copper wiring (using LVDS) embedded in a thin plastic strip. National Semiconductor offered a variety of different implementations with up to 32 data lines, [2] as well as the same signals multiplexted using frequency-division multiplexing in a single fibre optic cable for longer links between machines.

Frequency-division multiplexing multiplexing dividing a comm medium into non-overlapping frequency bands, each carrying a separate signal

In telecommunications, frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) is a technique by which the total bandwidth available in a communication medium is divided into a series of non-overlapping frequency bands, each of which is used to carry a separate signal. This allows a single transmission medium such as a cable or optical fiber to be shared by multiple independent signals. Another use is to carry separate serial bits or segments of a higher rate signal in parallel.

The data lines were clocked at seven times the clock signal, so each clock "tick" moved 7 bits of data over each of the bus lines. For the Apple implementation this meant 7 bits times 6 links at 50 million times a second, for a raw data rate of 2.1 Gbit/s. Ten bits of the 42 were used for signalling and control, leaving 32 for data, resulting in a net data transfer rate of 1.6 Gbit/s, or 200 MB/s. This was only slightly faster than contemporary (1993) versions of PCI at ~130 MB/s, but much faster than NuBus of the same era, at about 20 MB/s. [3]

The bit is a basic unit of information in information theory, computing, and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit.

The gigabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix giga (symbol G) is defined in the International System of Units (SI) as a multiplier of 109 (1 billion, short scale), and therefore

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1000000 (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities.

Each QuickRing interface contained two such links, one for "upstream" and one for "downstream" connections in a point-to-point ring. Since the system was not a bus, machines could talk up and downstream at the same time without interfering with other users. The drawback was that each hop over an intervening point added a latency of up to 1.3 µs. Since QuickRing was built in a ring topology there was no need for a dedicated switch or router, potentially making the system lower cost to deploy. Two rings could be connected together by putting the bus IC's "back to back" in a switch, allowing for larger networks.

QuickRing routing used a circuit switching system, in which the message path is set up before the data is sent, and once set up the connection is very lightweight. This is as opposed to packet switching, in which every message contains all of the data needed to reach the destination, this is more flexible, but adds overhead. Of the 10 bits of control data, four were used to specify a circuit number, allowing for a total of 16 devices per ring.

Related Research Articles

Bus (computing) communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer

In computer architecture, a bus is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This expression covers all related hardware components and software, including communication protocols.

Industry Standard Architecture 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT

Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.

Conventional PCI local computer bus for attaching hardware devices

Conventional PCI, often shortened to PCI, is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. PCI is an abbreviation for Peripheral Component Interconnect and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any particular processor's native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space. It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock.

Expansion card a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot on a computer motherboard, backplane or riser card to add functionality to a computer system via the expansion bus

In computing, the expansion card, expansion board, adapter card or accessory card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot, on a computer motherboard, backplane or riser card to add functionality to a computer system via the expansion bus.

HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport (LDT), is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001. The HyperTransport Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology.

PCI Express computer expansion bus standard

PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, hard drives, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.

Scalable Coherent Interface organization

The Scalable Coherent Interface or Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI), is a high-speed interconnect standard for shared memory multiprocessing and message passing. The goal was to scale well, provide system-wide memory coherence and a simple interface; i.e. a standard to replace existing buses in multiprocessor systems with one with no inherent scalability and performance limitations.

Low-voltage differential signaling technical standard

Low-voltage differential signaling, or LVDS, also known as TIA/EIA-644, is a technical standard that specifies electrical characteristics of a differential, serial communications protocol. LVDS operates at low power and can run at very high speeds using inexpensive twisted-pair copper cables. LVDS is a physical layer specification only; many data communication standards and applications use it and add a data link layer as defined in the OSI model on top of it.

Serial ATA computer bus interface

Serial ATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.

Front-side bus computer communication interface (bus) often used in Intel-chip-based computers during the 1990s and 2000s; replaced by replaced by HyperTransport, Intel QuickPath Interconnect or Direct Media Interface in modern CPUs

A front-side bus (FSB) is a computer communication interface (bus) that was often used in Intel-chip-based computers during the 1990s and 2000s. The competing EV6 bus served the same function for AMD CPUs. Both typically carry data between the central processing unit (CPU) and a memory controller hub, known as the northbridge.

Serial communication Type of data transfer

In telecommunication and data transmission, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels.

CompactPCI

CompactPCI is a computer bus interconnect for industrial computers, combining a Eurocard-type connector and PCI signaling and protocols. Boards are standardized to 3U or 6U sizes, and are typically interconnected via a passive backplane. The connector pin assignments are standardized by the PICMG US and PICMG Europe organizations. The connectors and the electrical rules allow for eight boards in a PCI segment. Multiple bus segments are allowed with bridges.

PCI-X computer bus and expansion card standard

PCI-X, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended, is a computer bus and expansion card standard that enhances the 32-bit PCI local bus for higher bandwidth demanded mostly by servers and workstations. It uses a modified protocol to support higher clock speeds, but is otherwise similar in electrical implementation. PCI-X 2.0 added speeds up to 533 MHz, with a reduction in electrical signal levels.

Double data rate

In computing, a computer bus operating with double data rate (DDR) transfers data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal. This is also known as double pumped, dual-pumped, and double transition. The term toggle mode is used in the context of NAND flash memory.

The Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) is a point-to-point processor interconnect developed by Intel which replaced the front-side bus (FSB) in Xeon, Itanium, and certain desktop platforms starting in 2008. It increased the scalability and bandwidth available. Prior to the name's announcement, Intel referred to it as Common System Interface (CSI). Earlier incarnations were known as Yet Another Protocol (YAP) and YAP+.

In computer technology, transfers per second and its more common secondary terms gigatransfers per second (abbreviated as GT/s) and megatransfers per second (MT/s) are informal language that refer to the number of operations transferring data that occur in each second in some given data-transfer channel. It is also known as sample rate, i.e. the number of data samples captured per second, each sample normally occurring at the clock edge. The terms are neutral with respect to the method of physically accomplishing each such data-transfer operation; nevertheless, they are most commonly used in the context of transmission of digital data. 1 MT/s is 106 or one million transfers per second; similarly, 1 GT/s means 109, or equivalently in the US/short scale, one billion transfers per second.

VPX technology was presented at Bus&Board (VITA) in 2004. VPX, formally known as VITA 46, is an ANSI standard that provides VMEbus-based systems with support for switched fabrics over a new high speed connector. Defined by the VITA working group, it has been designed specifically with defense applications in mind, with an enhanced module standard that enables applications and platforms with superior performance. VPX retains VME's existing 6U and 3U Eurocard form factors, supporting existing PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) and XMC mezzanines, and maintaining the maximum possible compatibility with VMEbus.

The XSwitch is an interconnect used by the XCore processor. The interconnect protocol is defined by XMOS, and is based around routing messages comprising 9-bit tokens between cores on a network. The protocol is specifically designed for on-chip and board-level communication, but using LVDS drivers it can also run over longer cables.

References

  1. ↑ Questions about SCI
  2. 1 2 Apple introduces 1.5 Gbyte/s Mac QuickRing bus in step toward advanced net, multimedia use [ permanent dead link ], Electronic News, May 18, 1992
  3. ↑ QuickRing Speed

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.