IntroductionxvIntroductionThe AcerAltos 21000 is a powerful 64-bit quad-processor systemloaded with a host of new and innovative features. The system offersa new standard for flexible productivity ideal for local or wide areanetworks and multi-user server environments.Intel Pentium II Xeon Processor with the Intel 450NXChipsetThe Pentium II Xeon processor, like its predecessors, the PentiumPro and Pentium II processors, implements a Dynamic Executionmicro-architecture - a unique combination of multiple branchprediction, data flow analysis, and speculative execution. This meansthat the Pentium II Xeon can deliver higher performance than thePentium Pro processor while maintaining binary compatibility with allprevious Intel Architecture processors.Also, the Pentium II Xeon processor is available in 512K, 1MB, and2MB L2 cache options with the introduction of the Slot 2 socket.Unlike Slot 1 Pentium IIs, which access the L2 at half the processorspeed, the Slot 2 accesses the L2 at full processor clock speed. Anaddition to the Pentium II Xeon processor is the Intel 450NX chipset,for servers with four or more processors, which supports a 100MHzfront-side bus, USB (four ports), a south bridge to the ISA bus,provides up to 8GB of memory support and multiple 32-bit and 64-bitPCI buses.In addition to meeting the mission-critical and fast system responsetime requirements of enterprise servers, the AcerAltos 21000 is faulttolerant and capable of preventing faults from occurring. It alsodemonstrates graceful performance scalability when the systemconfiguration is expanded.