Method of communication for a computer using packet switches for internal data transfer

摘要

A method of internal data communication for a packet-switching computer includes the step of configuring internal components of the computer and an internal packet switch bank to communicate using a fixed size local data packet. The local data packet has a fixed size header portion and a fixed size data portion. The local data packet may be directly compatible with an ATM cell. Alternatively, only the data portion size of the local data packet may correspond to the size of the ATM cell data payload or an integer multiple thereof. In order to increase data throughput, the size of the header portion of the local data packet may be less than size of the ATM cell header.