DEC 7000 AXP and DEC 10000 AXP
A field upgrade from a VAX 7000/10000 to a DEC 7000/10000 AXP was possible by means of swapping the processor boards.
The DEC 7000/10000 AXP were intended to supersede the VAX 6000 series, and themselves were succeeded in 1995 by the AlphaServer 8200 and 8400 (TurboLaser) enterprise servers.
The upper part of the cabinet contains the LSB card cage on the left and the control panel and power subsystem on the right.
It consists of a single blower that draws air from the top and bottom of the cabinet, expelling it through vents in the middle.
Under the blower are four plug-in unit (PIU) quadrants for PIUs, enclosures which house options.
It is identical to the system cabinet except that the LSB card cage is replaced by two additional PIU quadrants, identified as 5 and 6.
The LEVI also implement the Gbus, an 8-bit bus to which hardware providing console functionality is connected to.
Devices connected to the Gbus are a set of seven 128 KB (8-bit by 131,072-word) flash ROMs for storing the console program, an 8 KB (8-bit by 8,192-entry) EEPROM for storing miscellaneous parameter and log information, three devices containing two UARTs each for implementing six serial lines and a watch chip containing a time-of-year clock, 50 bytes of battery-backed-up RAM and a lithium battery rated to last for 10 years.
The MS7AA provided dynamic random access memory (DRAM) for implementing the main memory, whereas the MS7BB provided a non-volatile cache for accelerating Network File System (NFS) performance when used in conjunction with Prestoserve software from Legato Systems.
The SIMMs are not socketed as Digital's engineers found the arrangement to be unreliable.
At a system level, the memory subsystem supports a maximum of eight-way interleaving.
It contained 16 MB of non-volatile memory used to cache writes to the file system.
The non-volatile memory was built from SRAM, and in event of power failure, a battery pack containing 14 batteries located on the module would power the SRAM for up to 48 hours, retaining the data.
It contains four parallel ports (not to be confused with the parallel ports found in personal computers) that connect to adapters, which implement an expansion bus, in the plug-in units (PIUs) housed in the system cabinet or expander cabinet via cables that are up to three meters long.
Each parallel port, if sending data from the memory to the I/O subsystem, has a maximum bandwidth of 88 MB/s.
If the parallel port is sending data from the I/O subsystem to the memory, it has a maximum bandwidth of 135 MB/s.
It contains a card cage with nine usable slots and the DWLAA adapter, which implements the bus and interfaces it to the I/O controller on the I/O port module.
Futurebus capability was optional and up to three can be installed in a system, with a maximum of two per cabinet.
One to four XMI PIUs are supported in a system, with a maximum of two per any type of cabinet.
