Since the chosen Intel® 82574IT GbE controllers are PCI Express® based, the CN7-REVERB is equipped in addition with a PCI to PCI Express® bridge, and a 6-port PCI Express® packet switch.

In addition, the CN7-REVERB is equipped with the PLX PEX8606 6-lane 6-port PCI Express® packet switch. One lane is tied to the bridge chip as the upstream (host) port, while the other five downstream lanes/ports are dedicated to the Ethernet controller devices. Each PCI Express® port is a virtual PCI to PCI bridge device and will be configured using standard (BIOS) PCI enumeration. Hence, the original Intel® networking drivers and tools (available by download for a variety of OS) are unaltered and smoothly suitable for the CN7-REVERB.

However, at 33MHz, the 32-bit CompactPCI® backplane would be limited to 133MByte/s maximum data throughput. Needless to say, that this bandwidth would not be sufficient, if an application needs continuous support for high data rates simultaneously over all the Ethernet ports available on the CN7-REVERB. Hence, for QOS based and realtime applications, e.g. vision systems with high resolution cameras, consider the CCL-CAPELLA as an alternative solution, with four independent 82574IT Ethernet controllers. Since the CCL-CAPELLA is a mezzanine side card to EKF CPU boards, the CPCI backplane bottleneck will be avoided (immediate connection established by a PCI Express® x 4 link instead).