Overview

The Broadcom NetXtreme II Dual Port 10GBase-T Adapter provides:

• A turnkey dual-port 10 GbE adapter solution operating at 100 m over CAT6a or CAT7 unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cable
• Interoperable with IEEE standard devices operating at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps over existing CAT5 UTP
• A dependable, performance-focused solution that can be optimized for high throughput and high I/O per second, with low CPU utilization

Broadcom offload architecture minimizes the CPU overhead, eliminating competition with the host application for host resources and freeing valuable CPU cycles for processing user applications:

• TCP offload engine (TOE) accelerates network data transfers, with high I/O-per-second and high bandwidth.
• Receive side scaling (RSS) is used to avoid bottlenecks by distributing network processing across multiple CPUs.
• Adaptive interrupt coalescing streamlines interrupt processing.
• Message Signal Interrupt (MSI/MSI-X) allows interrupt distribution in multi-CPU systems.

Broadcom’s 10GBASE-T PHY is based on highly advanced digital signal processing to allow robust operation over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) wiring. It is a highly integrated solution that combines enhanced analog front ends with digital adaptive equalizers, ADCs, phase-locked loops, line drivers, LDPC encoders and decoders, echo cancellers, crosstalk cancellers, and all required support circuitry.

Features and specifications

The Broadcom NetXtreme II Dual Port 10GBase-T adapter has the following features:

• Offers an end-to-end solution up to 10 Gb on Category 6A or 7 UTP cabling up to 100 m, and up to 1 Gb on Category 5E UTP cabling up to 55 m
• Two integrated RJ-45 Ethernet ports operating at 10/100/1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps speeds
• pNIC mode support
• Supports failover and NIC teaming
  • Smart Load Balancing
  • IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation
• Supports PXE 2.1
• Jumbo frame support (up to 9 KB)
• IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging support
• IEEE 802.1x flow control support
• IEEE 802.1p quality of service (QoS) support
• Supports IPv4 and IPv6
• Supports Broadcom Advanced Control Suite (BACS)

Performance features:

• TCP offload engine (TOE)
• TCP, IP, UDP checksum offload
• Receive side scaling (RSS)
• TCP segmentation offload (TCO)
• Giant send offload (GSO)
• Message Signal Interrupt (MSI/MSI-X)

The Broadcom NetXtreme II Dual Port 10GBase-T adapter has the following specifications:

• Form factor: Low-profile half-length PCIe, with standard (3U) or low-profile (2U) bracket (both brackets included)
• Host interface: PCIe x8 Gen 2
• Communication module: Broadcom BCM57712 MAC and BCM84823 PHY