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| Intel® Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controllers - Optimized for Multi-Core Intel® Processor-based Servers |
The need for optimization |
| As IT departments rely increasingly on their networks to carry more and more traffic, the demand on servers increases as well. The high performance and energy efficiency of multi-core Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers is helping drive the adoption of server virtualization, high-performance computing, and other I/O-intensive applications, all of which require the fastest possible response time. And with the growing adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and multi-port Gigabit Ethernet, the amount of network data a server's CPU needs to process will continue to grow. |
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The Intel® 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller and the Intel® 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller are optimized for multi-core Intel Xeon processor-based systems to alleviate the network throughput and overhead problems associated with previous-generation server platforms.
In these previous platforms, application data requests were associated with a single processor and handled sequentially, raising CPU utilization levels. Intel's next-generation Ethernet controllers distribute the workload to available processor cores using MSI-X and VMDq, receive-side scaling, and Scalable I/O, which use multiple queues to process multiple requests simultaneously. These improvements result in lower CPU utilization, lower latency, and better application response times.
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| MSI-X |
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| MSI-X enables the Ethernet controller to direct interrupt messages to multiple processor cores. If a queue is bound to a specific processor core, the Ethernet controller can send interrupt messages to that core, allowing the other cores to ignore the message. The Intel 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller and Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller give each queue its own set of MSI-X-controllable interrupt vectors, which allows for efficient packet management. |
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| Multiple queues |
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| To spread the workload across cores, the network controller directs data packets to individual queues. The data in these queues can be accessed by driver threads running on different processor cores, such that multiple cores can process network packets in parallel. The Intel 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller supports four transmit and four receive queues per port. The Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller provides 32 transmit queues and 64 receive queues per port, which can be mapped to maximum of 16 processor cores. |
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| Receive-side scaling |
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| Receive-side scaling (RSS) routes incoming packets to specific queues, efficiently balancing network loads across CPU cores and increasing performance on multi-processor systems. RSS, called Scalable I/O in Linux*, creates a hash table from IP, TCP, and Port Addresses and uses that table to decide which queue to route a packet to, and to which processor the packet should be associated. |
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| Virtual Machine Device queues |
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In addition to the optimizations for multi-core processor based servers, these products also include Virtual Machine Device queue (VMDq) technology, which offloads data sorting from the virtual machine monitor (VMM) software layer to the hardware by routing packets from specific queues to specific virtual machines. This improves overall throughput and CPU utilization on virtualized servers. VMDq technology also ensures transmit fairness and prevents head-of-line blocking to deliver enhanced latency performance.
By taking advantage of these technologies, Intel's new Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers provide improved data delivery on multi-core Intel Xeon processor-based systems and in virtualized environments. In a world that increasingly relies on the network for real-time or near real-time data delivery, next-generation Intel® Ethernet controllers provide enhanced capabilities that take advantage of the latest multi-core server platforms to deliver fast and efficient networking.
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