Slashdot Mirror

2920X = $649 i9-9900K = $580

Frankly you'd be nuts to go for the intel chip when you can get 50% more cores AND an upgrade path to 64 cores for around the same price.

Intel Atom® Processor C3958, 16-core, 16-thread (no hyper-threading) low power (full load 47W), fan-less design, with 16MB cache, up to 2.0GHz, can access up to 256GB of RAM, and can be used as a edge-computing device or a dedicated web server.

https://ark.intel.com/products...

Server motherboards from Supermicro, TYAN, or Gigabyte, with CPU attached, for less than $800.

https://b2b.gigabyte.com/Serve...
https://www.tyan.com/Motherboa...
https://www.supermicro.com/pro...

When can AMD offer us something similar?

Just a quick Google search:

https://www.supermicro.com/Apl...
https://www.tyan.com/EN/campai...

Several models mention being able to use 2 TB of RAM, with dual socket ones being able to reach 4 TB.

Most manufacturers now make barebones servers specifically designed to cram in GPUs. Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all offer virtual servers with multiple dedicated GPU's as well. Yes, your run of the mill server is still headless with an ASpeed IPMI but you can get absolutely crazy with GPU server platforms.

So I'm not (quite) a paranoid nutcase for running server-class hardware, including always using ECC DIMMS. Current desktops are older Dell T3500s, with nearly top bin Xeons, upgraded supplies and graphics, plus, of course, 24GBytes of ECC RAM.

First big splurge on a desktop had a Tyan mainboard with the ServerWorks chipset (since Intel's were pathetic, at the time), dual P-IIIs, PCI-X, PLUS an AGP slot. Awesome, for its time.

http://www.tyan.com/archive/l_chinese/html/pr01_s2567.html

500 DIMMS and it can't be re-purposed to new servers?
Buy some of these when you can find a shipment.
128GB per server should be enough to do *something*.

500 DIMMS is almost enough to populate a whole rack of 2U servers built around these boards.
That maxes out at approx 1000 cores with 2TB of RAM.
Pair it with a SAN and you could be the next cloud provider.

You can buy some really crazy system components these days you know.

Take for instance this particular gem from Tyan:

Properly populated, that system board would make a very very nice hobby rendering node. (granted, rather pricy to fully populate one just for hobby use, and it WOULD snarf down electricty like a starving villager at an all you can eat buffet... But you would only run it when you needed to start doing production quality rendering, which is one of the final stages of CG production.)

I have already decided that such a system is going to be my next "Upgrade", and had done so far before this short film came out. I kinda like the idea of having 256GB of available system RAM. I am fairly confident that it could run Crysis at full specs. (I could be mistaken though-- I mean, it IS crysis afterall..)

For the dedicated professional, I could easily see somebody building one.

First, look at those opterons again and look at the 4 socket plus 4 socket riser Tyan stuff again, you information is somewhat out of date which is why I'm talking about new possibilities while you are putting forward what has only recently become an incorrect argument.

From Tyan's page:

Supported CPU Series: AMD 45nm Quad-Core Opteron 8300 Series Processors [...]

AMD's FAQ also notes that 2000-series CPUs only support two socket boards.

If you have information about 2000-series CPUs working in 8-socket boards, then by all means share it, but it certainly appears that would be news to both Tyan and AMD.

You end up with annoyingly long periods of time where one node is still going and other nodes are waiting for it. When the price point shifts radically why take "adequate" when "good" isn't much more expensive.

Because at this point it appears "good" is still much more expensive.

Also you have entirely missed the point that there are many jobs that are entirely CPU bound and that is what I was writing about, I'm saying there are many cases where you have jobs that are purely limited by how many instructions you can do and that is what you throw systems or clusters with a lot of CPUs at.

I haven't missed the point at all, I'm simply highlighting the fact that such jobs - where a cluster of machines interconnected with Ethernet, Infiniband, or similar won't do it just as well, and a lot cheaper - are few and far between.

IMHO your example has a premise that experience with both Xeon and opteron systems shows has little merit about the speed difference, your misunderstanding of my statements and your mixing up of terminology of CPU to the stupid salesfolk form instead of anything of technical use is too much for me to handle this late at night.

Uh huh. Perhaps you can enlighten me about how I have misused any terminology rather than wave your hands about.

It is bogus and here's the proof: http://tyan.com/newsroom_pressroom_detail.aspx?id=1289 I found that a few weeks ago when I was spec'ing out a system with a tyan mobo.

Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!

There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.

Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.

Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:

CASE
Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B)
This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.

Motherboard
Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207
I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.

Good luck!

So, yeah, I'm not touching Tyan again.

So, yeah, I'm not touching Tyan again.

I'm running a Tyan Thunder K8WE with 8GB and a pair of 275's using FreeBSD. Excellent expansion, solid hardware, and well liked, though getting on a little bit; you might like to look at some of the newer Socket F options.

These boards aren't cheap, though; here in the UK you're looking at ~£250, which looks to be about the same as Xeon motherboards. You have specialist needs, suck it up.

the 5000x chip needs FB-DIMMS that cost more then DDR 2 ECC.

A dual cpu dual quad or dual dual-core system with 2 to 4 gb per cpu will cost less + you can get a board with the nforce pro chip set.

up to 32 GB DDR2 667/533/400 ECC ram + on board sas hardware raid also High-End PCI-e Graphics (SLI Supported)
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron2000/MCP55/H8DA3-2.cfm

or this one

http://tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=541

Tyan and Supermicro, which both focus on the server/workstation market, are the only motherboard makers I've heard about releasing motherboards based on the 5100 chipset. If you trust the Intel brand for reliability, then I think this Intel chipset on a Tyan or Supermicro motherboard might be a decent compromise.

• Tyan Tempest i5100X (S5375) - Seems to be out of stock everywhere (searched Google Products), but it's being listed at about $320 to $400. It's a server board, but it looks like it would make a decent workstation (PCIe x16 slot, integrated audio, extended ATX size).
• Supermicro X7DCL-i - In the same price range as the Tyan board, but seems to be available at a few online stores (like this). Standard ATX size, but lacks PCIe x16 slot.

My desktop uses one of these. Not sure what your point is supposed to be though.

Open hardware seems to have been manufactured

The company your are looking for is Tyan. http://www.tyan.com/ Their workstation and server boards are some of the most reliable around, i.e., for people in the know. You don't hear much about them from "mainstream" review sites because the boards lack l33t OC'ing features and super cool LED lit fans. Take a look at their workstation boards, they make a great desktop board alternative. Available for AMD and Intel CPU's.

I have had zero issues with any series of boards I have used from them, and all of them with Linux no less.

If this form factor is restrictive, then the Mac mini's energy efficient notebook chipset (Intel 945GM) can be had in a microATX motherboard w/PCI Express x16 slot (Asus N4L-VM DH, $82 at Newegg), a FlexATX motherboard (Tyan Tomcat i945GM), or Mini-ITX barebones (MSI Axis 945GM).

I strongly advocate that every geek drop in at a local school or school division and talk to them about IT. The existing clunkers may make fine thin clients and a few new servers do not cost much to use as Linux terminal servers (see http://ltsp.org/ ). There are several distros that automate the conversion of a reasonable PC with two NICs, some extra RAM and storage into a Linux terminal server so that the old machines or new thin clients have only to show the pictures and receive the clicks. Thus a whole lab gets to log in and run on a single good server. Maintenance is down an order of magnitude this way as only one machine needs a file system. Debian, Ubuntu, SkoleLinux and K12LTSP have reasonable repositories for schools. These system do everything a school may need except allow full screen video to every seat. All the normal click/gawk/click stuff works beautifully. Teachers can easily monitor/control each student using VNC or whatever. I like to log a student out when they wander... or I block their favourite time-wasting sites. These are powerfull payoffs for schools who make a small investment in effort to install such a system. It is useful in a single classroom, a lab, or a whole building.

Schools that have a bit of money to spend can invest in a powerful server that can run a whole school over gigabit/s. A motherboards like TYAN S3992 (see http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid= 235 ) are just made for this with Lots of RAM, dual gigabit/s NICs, and dual Socket F Opterons. The investment in such a server is spread over every seat in the system and the per-seat cost can be $25 or so for the server, free systems donated by government or business ($0) or new thin clients such as NTAVO 6040 ($139) with LCD screen, USB keyboard and mouse really is very cost effective and easy to maintain. Having a single server is a little less reliable as a single point of failure but having fewer parts also saves money.

Case: Koolance PC4-1036
Motherboard: Tyan Thunder n3600M
Raid: 3ware 9650SE-24M8
Hard Drives Seagate 750GB
RAM water cooled
Power supply: Koolance 1200W

AMD quad-core chip will have shared L3
also lack of quality of the interconnect for intel means that you will like not see a duel cpu system with out a non intel chip set. And the nforce pro chip sets have sli with 2 full x16 slots and left over lanes for x4 slots while most intel ones don't even have 1 x16 slot at full speed.
some have do have x16 and a x4

look at
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/xeon.html
then look at
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/opteron.html

also look at
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeo n1333/?chp=5000X

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n2000/

AMD quad-core chip will have shared L3
also lack of quality of the interconnect for intel means that you will like not see a duel cpu system with out a non intel chip set. And the nforce pro chip sets have sli with 2 full x16 slots and left over lanes for x4 slots while most intel ones don't even have 1 x16 slot at full speed.
some have do have x16 and a x4

look at
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/xeon.html
then look at
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/opteron.html

also look at
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeo n1333/?chp=5000X

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n2000/

Except this was available more than a year ago, as 2x4, with each CPU having it's own memory bus too.

Examples:
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thundern4250qe.h tml

I can't handle those PPC bashing Intel fanboy comments. Even if he is boss of Apple and got my money for quad G5, anyone claiming a computer 4x and 5x faster than they sold just 2 days ago deserves to get ignored.

I mean there is a sentence saying "Up to 5x faster" used for a SERVER product. If you believe it somehow, some guys as IBM must investigate what really made those G5 Xserve 5x slower.

I am happy Apple could come up with something that is faster than Quad G5 but I can't see them as a serious company anymore.

If I was given moderator rights and Steve Jobs posted something claiming Dell is 4x faster than Apple with another nickname, I would moderate him "-1 troll" just 2 years ago.

No, my mind didn't change. I just gave up reading Apple.com site as a Mac owner and check sites like http://www.power.org/ to watch how the processor he bitches about performing.

I am saying again. Based on my local, quick and dirty benchmarks: Quad Xeon is slightly faster than Quad G5. Lets say 30%. Of course it has better memory and Xeon is a nice WORKSTATION CPU which is in use for years. Why making people mad by using "5x faster" crap? Is it part of Intel deal? I have never seen a professional workstation or a server dubbed "5x faster" in my life. It is completely non serious.

No reason to make their own customers nuts since they started point people to sites like http://www.tyan.com/ for companies doing those Xeon monsters for years. Call my system 5x slow yes? There you go.

"You're completely full of shit. Intel has surpassed Altivec, benchmarks prove it. I don't know what you're babbling about the world cup for. Does Quad G5 excel at playing soccer?"

Real life having people watched soccer, billion+ plus. The excerpts from World Cup relied on 4 Quad G5s, a mission critical (paid content) and time critical job. Like I gave the clue, Workstations have different things to do. It does 1080p suitable (likely 2k) RAW editing, real time and serves them in at least 4 formats to recipients. Got me now? That is first time so many formats and so many platforms exist for distributing such content. First time they are paid content in some platforms such as 3G.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/22/worldcup/i ndex.php

"Finally, you have the gall to act as if a folding@home list means something. You are truly stupid. Here's a clue: If I had been running folding@home for 1 day with a quad G5 and for 5 years with a dozen pentium II's, who do you think would have the higher ranking? You are either stupid or you think everyone else is. I vote "a lot of column A, a little of column B".

I get HD content here and downsample them to SDI, once I had to output to Betacam SP which wouldn't allow a single frame loss. You consumer grade Intel fanboys are really don't know what you talk about.

Folding@home means very much. It is a real life , highly advanced scientific computation which does use whatever it can. It is the benchmark of benchmarks. Also it is not very popular in Mac community since many Macs are used in professional applications which really doesn't like something running idle at background.

Next time speak about machines you can afford and don't bitch/comment about professional workstations. Even Intel preferring professionals laugh at you since the machines they use has NOTHING to do with your Intel Core Duo crap. Go check http://www.tyan.com/ for a clue.

I didn't forget about answering to DRM. You just can't figure what it means putting a TPM/DRM chip to a computer by default. Also it includes your very polite , new Apple Intel cheap whitebox customer profile like name calling "dipshit". I would answer that but that time you would feel like calling FBI.

Also next time , dare to post your own nick and uid OK? It is lower than posting with AC.

How about DVD9 + $CODEC? It's cheap, proven, and already availible on the market. Not to mention, improvements could be made with code updates to players.

1) Buy Bunches of Dual Layer DVDs, 8-Processor Motherbord and 8 Dual-core processors (And other stuff)
2) Restore Movies from Film onto RAW avi in 1080p
3) Transcode into $CODEC
4) Burn transcoded video to Disk as Data
5) Build DVD player with HDMI port
6) ???
7) PROFIT!

How about DVD9 + $CODEC? It's cheap, proven, and already availible on the market. Not to mention, improvements could be made with code updates to players.

1) Buy Bunches of Dual Layer DVDs, 8-Processor Motherbord and 8 Dual-core processors (And other stuff)
2) Restore Movies from Film onto RAW avi in 1080p
3) Transcode into $CODEC
4) Burn transcoded video to Disk as Data
5) Build DVD player with HDMI port
6) ???
7) PROFIT!

The system that I'm currently considering building (to replace my old Dual-Opteron 2Ghz single-core system that I use for video editing):

Antec p180b case (fairly new on the market)
Tiger K8WE (S2877)
(2) Opteron 270/275/280 chips
4GB RAM
WinXP Pro (32bit still, not comfortable with 64bit yet)

Probably a 500W P/S. Pair of 400GB PATAs and (4) 400GB SATAs.

Noise-wise it shouldn't be terribly bad. The current unit is crammed into a Antec Sonata case but with only (4) HDs. The big key is the 120mm fans in the case combined with the fairly quiet Opteron fans. Heat is the big problem in the smaller Sonata case which is why I'm moving up to the p180/p180b cases for the next system.

I'm just waiting for dual-core Opteron prices to drop a bit more (I'd prefer to only pay ~$300/chip).

TYAN manufactures server mobo's with 4 chipsets (socket 940) capable of dual-core. You can use Opteron's for a total of 8 cores. There is also an expansion available to add 4 more socket 940 chips, although I am not sure of Opteron's ability to assimilate 16 cores.
notice the memory bus architecture on the boards. if money were no object.....

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html

> Hell, the only reason it works with things like MythTV without jumping through hoops is because computers have so much memory for cache in them these days.

Funny that MythTV only requires 256MB of ram..... That's very little for running the OS, backend services, Myth frontend & backend while leaving so much for cache as you say! Take a look at Myth's hardware requirements....

Memory
A MythTV host that is both a backend and a frontend and using software encoding with a single capture card should run adequately in 256MB of RAM. Additional RAM above 256MB will not necessarily increase performance, but may be useful if you are running multiple encoders.

And then rember back when TIVO came out (1999) 256MB of ram was not uncommon. The motherboard I used back in 1997 could take 512MB but as I recall I had 256MB.

You need to find another reason why MythTV works so well...(Unless you believe 1997 is "These Days"). By the way have you ever used MythTV to be such a critic?

If we are going to run 1000W, EPS 12V etc.

Why not use a quad socket mobo that can have dual procs for 8 cores? Sun and Tyan both have them. Supermicro is on the catchup.

Maby you cant fit it in 1u, but Tyan makes the K8QW that supports 8 Opterons with the M4881 add on processor board. Meaning you got 16 cores of pure powa. Go ahead, compile the internet. I'd be interested in knowing if there was anything higher than that.

Next look into RAID. Make absolutely certain that you are not utilizing onboard RAID and are instead using an addon card. I can guarantee you that any mobo you can afford with onboard RAID will in fact be software-based RAID ano not hardware RAID. You're looking at buying a real server board if you want true hardware-based onboard RAID. I just bought Tyan's Thunder K8WE. It's a $500 mobo. I found out too late that the onboard SATA RAID is Nvidia software RAID. I also got boned with the onboard Nvidia 10/100/1000 nics and the damned builtin firewall that can't be disabled but that's another story. Buy an addon SATA RAID controller. I recommend 3Ware (AMCC) but LSI, Adaptec and a few others are good as well. DO NOT BUY Highpoint or Promise controllers. Highpoint controllers are actually fancy IDE controllers with the RAID functions happening in the driver. Promise controllers are much the same way and simply just suck.

There are other things you can do but I can't stay and type any longer.

"3. Intel = server CPU. This is a very high margin area that AMD continues to fail to penetrate"

you probably stoped following the server market, then.

since the release of their first 64 bit chips a while ago, AMD jumped from a virtual 0% penetration on the server market to more than 11%. except for Intel's best buddy *COUGH*michaeldell*COUGH* the other big player all have Opteron oferings. not to mention the small mom-and-pop shops that now have the oportunity to compete in the 16-way server market with boards like Thunder K8QW (S4881) which supports 8 (with aditional daughter card) dual core opterons.

AMD is inching it's way against intel in server, desktop and mobile with their great offerings. since i moved from 8-bit machines to PCs i've alway been an AMD user, and i'll continue to be for the foreseable future.

All those parts from Avadirect look just like the barebones systems I bought from Tyan. I presume they're using Tyan chassis/mobo systems and stuffing them with parts.

You can't compare a "white-box" server like that to something from Sun (or any of the other tier-1 server manufacturers). With tier-1 server boxes, you can get a 7x24 on-site service contract. This is really important when you're hosting machines off-site where you can't easily get to them, or don't want to spend money keeping a bunch of spares around. You also get support for the software bundle and known-good configurations out of the box. I had all sorts of fun issues with the buggy drivers for the on-board RAID controllers on those Tyans.

It's a Tyan nForce 4, based on what looks like a rackmount-optimized version of this. Nothing mindblowing, but they're well built and are a decent price; we got one to try out as a FreeBSD 6 appserver, and ordered 3 more as a result.

Only caveats are some harmless ACPI notices during bootup, the predictably mostly-useless nForce 4 ethernet (the other's a perfectly fine Broadcom), and the not-quite-working nForce SATA hotswap; standard Tyan nForce 4 + FreeBSD fare.

He already explained why this is so, I quote: "in part due to the PCI devices mapping resources, etc". This is 100% hardware related, and has nothing to do with the operating system or the memory he used. He really has 4Gig of RAM in his machine, but the motherboard doesn't allow more. I know this because I own a machine that does exactly this and because I read the manual (I only have 1Gig in it, and I see exactly 1Gig) I have this motherboard . Go and download the manual, go to page 12 and read the footnote.

I don't understand the reason for this memory eating part either, especially that it doesn't occur when having less than 4Gig... The problem does exist, and this motherboard cannot be the only one having this issue. As far as I can say it's AMD chipset related.

He already explained why this is so, I quote: "in part due to the PCI devices mapping resources, etc". This is 100% hardware related, and has nothing to do with the operating system or the memory he used. He really has 4Gig of RAM in his machine, but the motherboard doesn't allow more. I know this because I own a machine that does exactly this and because I read the manual (I only have 1Gig in it, and I see exactly 1Gig) I have this motherboard . Go and download the manual, go to page 12 and read the footnote.

I don't understand the reason for this memory eating part either, especially that it doesn't occur when having less than 4Gig... The problem does exist, and this motherboard cannot be the only one having this issue. As far as I can say it's AMD chipset related.

What do you mean there is nothing like this on the AMD side. The one you site has two PCI 2.2, one PCIe (8x) and two PCI-X (one 100/66 the other 66 only). This Opteron board on the otherhand has two PCIe (16x each), one PCI 2.3 and two PCI-X (one 100 and the other 133/100). Or if you want four way board you can try this one.

Unfortunately your argument does not hold water

What do you mean there is nothing like this on the AMD side. The one you site has two PCI 2.2, one PCIe (8x) and two PCI-X (one 100/66 the other 66 only). This Opteron board on the otherhand has two PCIe (16x each), one PCI 2.3 and two PCI-X (one 100 and the other 133/100). Or if you want four way board you can try this one.

Unfortunately your argument does not hold water

What do you mean there is nothing like this on the AMD side. The one you site has two PCI 2.2, one PCIe (8x) and two PCI-X (one 100/66 the other 66 only). This Opteron board on the otherhand has two PCIe (16x each), one PCI 2.3 and two PCI-X (one 100 and the other 133/100). Or if you want four way board you can try this one.

Unfortunately your argument does not hold water

No, a REAL real geek would get a Tyan Thunder K8QW with the M881 expansion board for a total of 8 sockets, populated with 8 dual core procs for a happy grand total of 16 processor cores! [droooool].

This of course assumes that the real-real geek is also independantly wealthy.

No, a REAL real geek would get a Tyan Thunder K8QW with the M881 expansion board for a total of 8 sockets, populated with 8 dual core procs for a happy grand total of 16 processor cores! [droooool].

This of course assumes that the real-real geek is also independantly wealthy.

I'm a huge AMD fan, and almost all of my machines are running either A64's or Opterons. But when it was time to build a file server, I went Xeon.

Why? No one offers a motherboard like this on the AMD side of things. The Tyan mobo just sprouts high-speed expansion busses, perfect for a box that will have multiple bonded gigE adatpers, multiple RAID controllers, etc. And everything was recognized by Linux the first time - total piece of cake install. This is because Intel makes **excellent** supporting chipsets that have all of their features well supported by Linux.

AMD boxes need more attention during install for things like gigE controllers and the like - at least that's been my experience. NVidia chipsets are simply not fully supported, and I'm not going to trust backwards-engineered stuff or binary-only releases over Intel-supplied, in-kernel drivers. VIA doesn't make really high-perfomance stuff, either, or at the very least no one is offering it as such.

Sorry, AMD, but until you continuously offer your own chipsets that offer all the options under Linux (and not rely on erstwhile partners like VIA and NVidia), Intel is going to continue to dominate. Intel makes motherboards and chipsets for a reason.

jh

Monarch has a quality reputation, but I have a few problems with that system. In order to build a true screamer, I think some component changeouts and modifications are in order.

Motherboard:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html This motherboard supports dual opterons, so you can stick in there 2 dual core opterons. Using processor affinity you could balance load across processors (I am not sure if you can use processor affinity per core - if anyone can answer that, I'd appreciate it.

Ramdrive
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24 80&p=1 These things are mainstream now (for those that lusted for years after the highend $10k+ ramdrives).

Soundcard
Creative Soundblaster based sound cards have had buggy drivers for as long as I can remember. Lets get some turtle beach in there, or better yet, some lower end audiophile hardware http://www.m-audio.com/index.php

Paltry amount of Ram
2 GB is like the lowest amount of ram I'd use for a highend performance system. 4 GB - 8 GB is more like the appropriate number. When I am running WoW, VLC, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp, TS, and Eric3 all at once. I want them all to be fast and responsive as if I had only one application running.

You must have missed that new 8 way Tyan opteron board, sweet jesus I want one and a 7800 (no SLI on this board for some reason).

check this baby out for example:

quad processor, with support module to add another 4, with dual core support... I am planning on getting this for a 3d rendering workstation at work:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html

Now imagine this fully populated, with a few TB array at 10W per drives, it goes up fast to 1Kw...

I'm planning on getting one of those for a specific 3D application where I need several cpus inside the main machine (render nodes wouldn't be as efficient) so I was actually wondering if there were a lot of 800W+ psus out there... interresting.

(please don't argue about the fact that 10 pcs would cost less blablalba, this is beyond the scope of this message, question was is there a use, yes there is :) )

On a tangent, where have you seen AMD64 MBs that support 64GB of RAM ? I've been thinking about using something like that for getting really good performance for a relatively big DB app, but all MBs I've seen have just 4 banks, and the biggest chips are 4MB. I guess a dual proc would double that :)

I have not seen any Opteron system which would require less than four processors to go to 64GB. Most bare motherboard makers I have seen have a max of 32GB even with their quad Opteron boards.

Here is a HP Proliant which will go to 64GB.

One thing I have noticed with boards that can take lots of RAM (32GB+), is that the higher you go, the slower the speed of the RAM is run at. It is very apparent with that HP. I guess there are so many memory modules in a 64GB system that they can't be reliably powered at full speed. Or maybe they put so much load on each of their busses that they bring the signals down closer to the noise and thus can't run at highest frequencies. Might be something to consider if you can get away with 16GB. Otherwise, regardless of this a 60 something GB ramdisk for a db is going to scream. You'll want a super reliable system with redundant power supplies! I guess at least the Gigabyte ramdisk card won't have trouble there, being battery backed.

Also on a related note, anyone know if it is possible in a disk mirroring setup, to use a ramdisk and a real disk in such a way that reads and writes are done only to the ramdisk and the real hard disk is merely written to to keep up to date at a lower priority? Super speed and redundancy. I have been wanting to do this with software mirroring between a software ramdisk and a real disk. Probably would be good for an SMP system, since ramdisks are heavy on CPU when they're in use (with software mirroring adding to that).

Actually, here is a 4-way (optional 8-way) Tyan Opteron board that will go to 128GB! It seems that it will go to 64GB with 4 procs.

First, the Apple card is irrellevant. That is more a function of Jobs continuing to limit what is a pretty easily portable OS to ONE architecture and I don't mean the CPU, I mean the motherboard and BIOS. If Jobs would finally get it through his head that Microsoft continuously kick's Apple's arse for, among other reasons, the fact that Apple refuses to position themselves as a software/OS company and tries to straddle the line, which Microsoft has carefully tried to avoid doing since forever. OSX is a good product and it is that which should be driving them. They'd go a lot farther if they went over to the PC hardware side with it. Imagine OSX on a quad 64 bit dual core Opteron SMP board. You can do it with Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Not OSX because Jobs can never admit he has ever been short of perfectly omnisciently right.

Second, AMD is in no danger of having a sizeable portion of their market taken by Intel and instead AMD has been making inroads into Intel's area with server class CPU offerings and the mobo makers have been making boards for them right along. For instance, that quad 64 bit dual core Opteron SMP board I mentioned above. I'd gladly buy one of these... if I won the lottery.

Third, yes, Intel should NOT be strong-arming anyone and they deserve to be rebuked by the courts for it, but it should be a criminal anti-trust slap and not a civil court slap as it looks more like vindictiveness and victimhood whinyness. "Look at us at AMD not getting enough of Intel's market because Intel is daring to defend themselves through unfair practices! Someone punish Intel for us so we can eat more of the market share!" Yes, I know that this administration isn't likely to do it, and a liberal Democrat administration would do it for politics sake so there's no real morally neutral enforcing the law angle there, sadly. Ideally, we'd need a business-friendly Republican administration to say, "okay, this is just wrong and you need to be called on the carpet for it." I ain't holding my breath so I guess civil court is the only recourse, again, sadly.

AMD already has the paranoid (and hypocritical) anti-corporate geek brigades behind it and has for a long time now. FUD based nonsense hate of Intel for ruling the market of a chipset they pioneered in the first place? Perfectly acceptable. Love of AMD despite them being also a big company? Perfectly acceptable. (Reminds me of the Google thing despite their lack of Linux support) I take all this with a grain of salt. On the merits, I find just the tactics bother me, not that they are actually trying to defend their market share. If AMD had pull themselves, I have ZERO doubt they'd do it themselves.

I'd be happiest if both of them combined all their instruction sets and promulgated a new baseline X86 instruction set. If NEC, Motorola, etc all made compatible chips and the mobo makers made boards for them, it would be better for the consumers' bottom line. Adhering to standards though would be the single most important thing so as not to fark the users and cause all sorts of unavoidable code forking. I don't need sixteen different Windows and Linux builds per type of either, ie, I don't need sixteen different FC4 builds due to processor differences...

After reading the whole AMD filling, I'm starting to doubt if the Tyan Tiger S2875 and the S2875S aren't dual core ready because of a/an Intel "quota" requirement... if so, i'm thoroughly pissed off at intel now. Looking at Tyna's lineup, there are other opteron boards not dual core compatible, and just as many that are according to this: http://www.tyan.com/support/html/cpu_athlon_duron_ opteron.html I can't seem to find a particular pattern that might say the S2875 should be dual core ready, and I don't know if Tyan is a staunch AMD supporter, it seems like it is (it also seems like anyone would have to be to put up with Intel and AMD at the same time, from the full brief I read). This is all I can find other than emailing Tyan myself: http://forums.amd.com/lofiversion/index.php/t45729 .html BTW, I have the Tyan Tiger K8W S2875

is, if you bought one of these, would a simple BIOS update let you run 4 quad cores together? *dribble*

Or, in the future, 4x32 core? In one single workstation? *drool*