OCTANE incorporates a crossbar switch in place of a traditional shared bus. The crossbar can dynamically and directly link any two computer subsystems, giving them a high-speed path without interfering or competing with other system activity. Six arms of the crossbar switch each provide 1.6 GB-per-second peak or 1.2 GB-per-second sustained throughput, which results in a system with extremely high bandwidth and very low latency for superb application performance. An additional link connects the crossbar to the memory controller for 1.0GB-per-second main memory peak bandwidth.