Dell PowerEdge R815 Technical Manual

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Dell PowerEdge R815 Technical Manual Manual pdf 34 page image

DellPowerEdge R815 Technical Guide 348 BIOS8.1 OverviewThe Dell™ PowerEdge™ R815 BIOS is based on the Dell BIOS core, and supports the following features:• G34 support• Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support• PCI 2.3 compliant• Plug-and-play 1.0a compliant• MP (Multiprocessor) 1.4 compliant• Boot from hard drive, optical drive, iSCSI drive, USB key, and SD card• ACPI support• PXE and WOL support for on-board NICs• Memory sparing support• SETUP access through key at end of POST• USB 2.0 (USB boot code is 1.1 compliant)• F1/F2 error logging in CMOS• Virtual KVM, CD, and floppy support• Unified Server Configurator (UEFI 2.1) support• Power management including DBS, Power Inventory, and multiple Power ProfilesThe PowerEdge R815 BIOS does not support the following:• BIOS language localization• BIOS recovery after bad flash8.2 Supported ACPI StatesSupported ACPI system states: S0, S4 (OS), and S5.8.3 Power Management Modes8.3.1 OS ControlAMD processors support Enhanced AMD PowerNow!™, which enables the processor to dynamicallychange its operating frequency in response to workload changes. The industry standardimplementation of this power management feature is in the Operating System (OS). The OS monitorsprocess/thread level utilization of the processor and uses processor controls to change theprocessor’s operating frequency. For heavy workloads, the OS will run the processor at higherfrequencies for additional performance. Lighter workloads do not need high performance, thus theOS will run the processor at lower frequencies.8.3.2 Active Power ControllerThe Dell Active Power Controller (DAPC) is a Dell proprietary implementation that provides improvedperformance/watt over the OS implementation of AMD PowerNow!. DAPC was first released with theeleventh-generation of PowerEdge server platforms. DAPC is implemented in system BIOS and useshardware level counters and other functions to determine hardware utilization. BIOS uses thisinformation to determine when to change the processor’s operating frequency.