nVidia nForce

cygnus writes: "Hardcore tech upstart site ExtremeTech.com got to check out an nVidia reference board, their findings are here. While most of the drivers and hardware were beta, they gave it some positive play. The story has a few large photos that are worth a gander... The reference board has only two PCI slots and no onboard Ethernet. Ouch. I'll stick with my Mac for now."

Comments

Memory interleaving

[SClitheroe]

One neat thing that this chipset supports is the so-called "twin-bank" technology. This interleaves access to the DDR DIMMS (ie. byte 1 is on DIMM1, byte #2 in on DIMM#2, byte #3 in on DIMM #3) to pump up the maximum memory bandwidth beyond what a single DDR DIMM would be capable of. I guess they had to do this since the GPU uses system memory (ugh), but it has a nice side-effect of really unleashing the performance potential of 1ghz+ CPU's, especially if you ditched the onboard video and stuck something decent in the AGP slot.

And to think, my 386 had interleaved memory back in the day..I was 'leet and didn't even know it ;)

Re:Memory interleaving

[Xross_Ied]

nForce does not use memory interleaving, it uses a memory crossbar.

memory interleaving:
Interleaving of different banks of memory which are in SERIES.
+ shortens address line setup time for sequential memory access.
+ upto 30% more bandwidth (depending on type of memory FPS/EDO/SDRAM) when the cache line is double (or quadruple) of the bus width.

memory crossbar = Interleaving of banks of memory which are in PARALLEL.
+ parallel memory transactions (if each is for a different bank).
+ improvements are less deterministic, depends on which transactions can be parallelized.
+ does reduce memory contention, i.e. different devices (CPU, Video, Disk, NIC) wanting access to memory at the same time.

For multimedia type applications (read games, DVD playback) this is a big help.

nForce's twin-bank memory sub-system reminds me of the Amiga's twin bank memory sub-system.

AMD in good position to take 30%

[diablovision]

AMD recently claimed they would have 30% overall market share by the end of the year, their goal before launching their 64 bit processor. It seems they are on track to meet those expectations. With NVidia's chipset offering a low-cost affordable solution for low-end machines and the 760MP chipset offering us the world's first multiprocessor AMD platform, they are putting themselves in a position to have real sway in the coming 64 bit desktop revolution.

Probably will be a success

[steveha]

AMD has had trouble selling into the low end of the market. Most of the trouble has been because the Intel side has low-cost motherboards with integrated video and sound. Vendors who want to build an inexpensive AMD system can get a Duron chip, but the savings are canceled out because they also have to buy video cards and audio cards.

Now nVidia is going to make it possible to make an integrated motherboard, and the performance is going to be excellent. The Duron totally crushes the Celeron, the GeForce MX totally crushes the 810 onboard video, and the audio DSPs totally crush everything currently on the market. As long as the price for a Duron plus one of these boards is about the same as the price for a Celeron plus an 810 motherboard, they will sell a whole bunch of these.

steveha

accuracy of content on ExtremeTech.com

[hillct]

A couple of days ago there was an article here on /. discussing the nature of content the ExtremeTech.com website. Some comments on that article at the time (including mine) made the mistake of assuming that the site was being run by ZD Net, which is a subsidiary of C|Net, which most readers here look down upon, however, aparently that information was in error. The tite is in fact managed by ZD Media which is a new division of Ziff Davis Publishing.

The earlier /. article is defintely worth a read though, when evaluating content from the Extreme Tech website.

Having said that, and regardless of the earlier postings here indicating inacuracies in the ExtremeTech hardware review being discussed here, I have to say the site look quite well put together and editorially fair.

--CTH


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A strange combination, to say the least.

[electricmonk]

To sum up the article, here are the most notable features of the nForce reference board that they recieved:

The chipset's North Bridge- Dubbed the "IGP", it provides for more efficient use of memory bandwidth using the GeForce3's crossbar switching technology. Note that this is the same kind of technology that SGI, Sun, and other high-performance UNIX hardware vendors have been using for their memory architecture (drool...)

Support for 128-bit DDR memory- This is just amazing. Not only will their particular implementation allow you to put different sizes of DIMMS in the board, but it will also allow DDR memory to boost it's bandwidth 100%, which means that instead of maxing out at 2.1GB/sec, it maxes out at 4.2GB/sec (again, drool...)

The link between the North and South Bridges- This will support bandwidth up to 800MB/sec, which means that it will have an excess even under unusual conditions, such as maxing out ATA/100, maxing out the PCI bus and outputting 256 streams of digital audio all at the same time. Simply awesome.

The built-in audio- The article gives a lengthy description of this. Suffice to say, it is better than any consumer card available today, built-in or otherwise.

Built-in graphics system- This actually was a little disappointing to me, because, while they may have it running at essentially AGP 6x, they used their budget system, the GeForce2 MX, for the processing. I'm also disappointed that it uses a "shared video memory" architecture that can be found in a lot of deplorable video platforms, notably the Intel i810 chipset. Basically, it uses up to 32MB of system memory for the frame buffer in addition to its onboard memory. However, with the huge amount of bandwidth available to the system memory, this may or may not be an issue.

Lack of support for 1394 and 64-bit PCI- Regrettably, they don't seem to have included support for either Firewire or 64-bit PCI. The lack of 1394 support is particularly surprising, as it has gotten increasingly better support from both Windows ME and Windows XP, as these are the main platforms which will be running on this board.

All in all, I think this is going to be an awesome board, a real leap ahead of everything else out there for the x86 market right now, at least in the consumer arena. I look forward to buying one, if the sticker shock isn't too harsh ;-).

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