The Power E1050 server has up to 11 PCIe slots in the systems drawer. A mix of PCIe Gen5 and Gen4 general-purpose hot-plug slots can deliver configuration flexibility and expandability. Two adapter slots are PCIe Gen5 8-lane, three adapter slots are PCIe Gen4 8-lane, and six adapter slots are Gen4 16-lane or Gen5 8-lane. All adapter slots are full-height, half-length in size. BSCs are used to house the adapter in the system unit for easy installation, removal, and service from the rear of the system. All the PCIe slots are single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) capable.
The 16-lane slots can provide up to twice the bandwidth of the 8-lane slots because they offer twice as many PCIe lanes. PCIe Gen5 slots can support up to twice the bandwidth of PCIe Gen4 slots and up to four times the bandwidth of a PCI Gen3 slot, assuming an equivalent number of PCIe lanes. PCIe Gen1, PCIe Gen2, PCIe Gen3, PCIe Gen4, and PCIe Gen5 adapters can be plugged into a PCIe Gen5 slot, if that adapter is supported. The 16-lane slots can be used to attach PCIe Gen3 I/O expansion drawers.
Table 1-7 shows the number of slots that is supported by the number of processor modules.
Table 1-7 Available PCIe slots
Chapter 1. IBM Power E1050 overview 13
Notes:
Ê The PCIe Genx8 slot, C1, is reserved for an Ethernet adapter to help ensure proper manufacture and test of the server.
Ê Each NVMe SSD interface is a Gen4 x4 PCIe bus. The NVMe drives can be in an OS-controlled RAID 0, RAID 1 array. Hardware RAID is not supported on the NVMe drives.
Ê This server has an energy-efficient design for cooling the PCIe adapter environment. The server can sense which IBM PCIe adapters are installed in their PCIe slots. If an adapter is known to require higher levels of cooling, the server automatically speeds up fans to increase airflow across the PCIe adapters.
Ê The terms “16-lane” and “x16” and “8-lane” and “x8” are interchangeably used in this case with the same meaning.
Figure 1-6 shows the 11 PCIe adapter slots location with labels for the Power E1050 server model.
Figure 1-6 PCIe adapter slot locations on the Power E1050 server
Slot C0 is not included in the list. It is meant for only the eBMC service processor card. The total number of PCIe adapter slots that is available can be increased by adding one or more PCIe Gen3 I/O expansion drawers (#EMX0). The maximum number depends on the number of processor modules physically installed. The maximum is independent of the number of processor core activations.
Table 1-8 list the number of maximum number of I/O drawers per populated socket.
Table 1-8 I/O drawers per populated processor socket
14 IBM Power E1050: Technical Overview and Introduction
The connection of each (#EMXG) fanout module in a PCIe Gen3 expansion drawer requires the installation of one (#EJ08)PCIe cable adapter to be placed in one of the PCIe x16 adapter slots of the system unit. For more information about PCIe Gen3 I/O drawer, see 2.3.4, “Attachment of I/O-drawers” on page 71.