Intel's 82430FX, or Triton, four-component
PCI chip set
was introduced in Pentiums earlier this year to boost performance for multimedia and other hungry applications. Most high-end Pentiums that are currently shipping incorporate the Triton design; however, its predecessor, the Neptune PCI chip set, is still used in some PCs. Except for the Dell Optiplex DGX, all the 133-MHz systems we tested for this Lab Report use the Triton chip set. Three of the seven 120-MHz models incorporate the Triton.
Triton is the third-generation Pentium processor PCI chip. Its integrated bus master IDE drive controller significantly reduces CPU utilization, freeing the processor to perform other tasks. Intel states that bus mastering reduces the CPU bandwidth required for IDE transfers from 20 percent to 1 percent.
The controller supports programmed I/O (PIO) Mode 3 (up to 16.7 MBps) and PIO Mode 4 (up to 16.7 MBps) and can provide data transfer rates up to 22 MBps in bus-master mode.
"Enhanced IDE provides better throughput for hard drives that support the faster IDE mode," says Mike Feibus, a principal at Mercury Research, which tracks PC components. "Support for EDO [extended data out] RAM and higher-performance PCI also improves performance. Clearly the presence [of PCI] has grown dramatically. Most of the Pentium PCs shipping have it, and it has become the de facto standard. It's the one to beat right now."
Triton also supports newer memory technologies like EDO DRAMs. Intel claims that the Triton chip set can increase data-stream speeds to as high as 100 MBps when using EDO memory. With a secondary memory cache, it can increase Windows system performance up to 30 percent over a Neptune system with conventional DRAM, Intel says. The core PCI logic supports 256 KB or 512 KB of write-back secondary memor
y cache using pipelined burst, burst, or standard static RAM.
An integrated plug-and-play port that can be used for audio devices enhances usability by making ISA motherboard peripherals into pseudo-PCI devices. The motherboard devices are rerouted to unused system resources. The Triton chip set also enables native signal processing (NSP), which is a way to run PC applications that demand more system resources for multimedia signal processing. Capabilities such as voice and data, telephony, wavetable MIDI audio, and speech recognition require sufficient MIPS along with a real-time environment for this type of processing.
The current Triton won't work with dual-processor PC configurations and doesn't support parity-memory checking, which checks the integrity of data after it has been sent.
Next year, Intel will unveil two new versions. The Triton II is designed for high-end servers and will support larger amounts of memory (the current Triton supports a maximum of 128 MB). The Triton VX will
be aimed at lower-level Pentium systems.
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The Triton chip set supports bus mastering, EDO memory, and native signal processing.
Triton-Based Pentiums
