Broadcom demonstrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) bi-directional line rate network performance utilizing only four lanes (x4) of PCI Express 2.0 (PCIe 2.0), thereby greatly reducing system resource requirements for 10 Gbps Ethernet controllers.
The demonstration features the Broadcom BCM57710 converged network interface controller (C-NIC) in conjunction with the advanced PCIe 2.0 host bus interface on an Intel next-generation server platform. Using only four lanes of the PCI Express interface, Broadcom delivers bi-directional line rate performance to the host server that provides a performance gain two times greater than that achieved with products utilizing the previous generation of PCI Express technology.
The BCM57710 can support up to eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 or PCIe 1.1 and enables either 5 Gbps or 2.5 Gbps data rate per lane. Equivalent functionality previously required eight lanes of PCIe 1.1 bus connectivity that doubled the amount of signaling overhead in previous generation server systems.
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