I saw this on CCO this past week looking for bachplane speed on the 6500's. I found this http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/si/casi/ca6000/prodlit/k6kfy_wp.htm
An Excerpt from the page: The Catalyst 6500 and the Switch Fabric Module (SFM) provide a 256-Gbps switching system with forwarding rates over 100 million pps. The SFM uses the connectors on the left side of the Catalyst 6500 chassis. Note that because these connectors are not in the Catalyst 6000, this chassis cannot use the SFM. The SFM uses a 256-Gbps crossbar switching fabric to interconnect the line cards on the switch. Figure 5 is a logical diagram of the SFM. The SFM can best be thought of as a 16-port "switch," with the ports actually connecting to the line cards. In the Catalyst 6500, each slot in the chassis receives two crossbar ports, and each port is clocked at 8 Gbps (the actual bandwidth is 16 Gbps because there is one 8-Gbps path for transmitting into the crossbar and 8 Gbps for transmitting out of the crossbar). The fabric-enabled modules connect to one of the ports on the crossbar, providing 8-Gbps access into the switching fabric. The fabric-only line cards attach to both ports per slot into the crossbar, allowing them 16 Gbps of connectivity. The Catalyst 6500 SFM uses overspeed to eliminate congestion and head-of-line blocking. Overspeed is a concept by which the internal "paths" within the crossbar fabric are clocked at a speed faster than the input rates into the crossbar. This allows packets to be switched out of the source module through the fabric to the output line card at high data rates. The SFM uses 3x overspeed, meaning that each internal trace is clocked at 24 Gbps relative to the input rate, which is clocked at 8 Gbps. HTH, ---Michael >From: "Mann, Chris" >Reply-To: "Mann, Chris" >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Switch Fabric? [7:52992] >Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 15:07:32 GMT > >Can someone please explain what is meant by a switch fabric? Or what is >means to have blades in your Catalyst switch that are fabric enabled? > >Thanks, > >Chris _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=53002&t=52992 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
