Overview: The heart of the I/O subsystem is the IOE ASIC. The IOE maximizes I/O performance by removing bandwidth bottlenecks, which can starve even the fastest system components. Its design delivers peak performance on Ethernet, SCSI and other I/O options, increasing system component throughput.

The IO Engine is designed to interface multiple slower I/O devices to the MRE (rendering) ASIC and the memory subsystem. The IOE ASIC collects data from relatively slow peripherals, buffers it in FIFOs and then transfers it into main memory using high speed DMA transfers. The IOE ASIC can be thought of as a large arbiter of DMA accesses between the following peripherals and ports.

Features:

• Ethernet (Autosensing 10/100 BaseT)
• Keyboard/Mouse
• Serial/Parallel (ISA interface)
• Real-time clock (ISA interface)
• A/V Module
• PCI Bus

• Color space conversion
• Video resize
• Square <-> Non-square pixel conversion
• Dedicated high-bandwidth streams for video, network, and PCI.