EP80579 Datasheet, PDF (131/1916 Pages) Intel Corporation – Intel® EP80579 Integrated Processor Product Line

Intel^® EP80579 Integrated Processor
4.0
Signaling
4.1
Overview
This chapter presents an overview of the inter-agent signaling mechanisms supported
along with the implications on transaction ordering necessary to support producer/
consumer software algorithms. This chapter concentrates primarily signaling for
functional, not error, purposes while Section 5.0, “Error Handling” provides additional
discussion on error signaling.
The EP80579 signaling model operates in a system-on-a-chip environment and must
blend the signaling architectures of many disparate components into a unified whole.
• Allow signaling between IA agents (i.e., the IA-32 core, IMCH, IICH, and external
PCI-Express-attached devices) and AIOC agents.
• Support producer/consumer relationships between agents in the IA or AIOC.
• Provide compatibility with existing IA signaling mechanisms for internal IMCH/IICH
agents and external devices.
• Provide compatibility with IA platform signaling semantics and abstractions.
There are two tightly related parts to the signaling model:
• The signaling mechanism determines how takes a signal from a source agent,
performs any necessary translation, and delivers it to a target agent in a form the
target can understand.
• The ordering mechanism determines how orders a given signal from a source agent
with respect to the data stream that the source agent produces to meet ordering
requirements.
Figure 4-1. Logical Overview of Signaling Architecture
PCI
Device(s)
IA Complex
PCI Ex _{(CPU, IMCH, IICH)}
EP80579
AIOC
Signal
Bridging
Internal
PCI
Agents
August 2009
Order Number: 320066-003US
Intel^® EP80579 Integrated Processor Product Line Datasheet
131