Small Form Factor Dual Opteron

Psionicist writes "IWILL has announced a new barebone, the IWILL ZMAXdp. Based on the nVIDIA nForce3 Pro 250Gb chipset, the computer offers dual Opteron support in a SFF format. "Volume production is planned in September, with a suggested price of $499. IWILL plans to get attention in workstation market. ZMAXdp will include proprietary form factor motherboard, 300W power supply, up to 2x3.5" HDD bay, and 1xAGP; PCI and SI can offer various configurations for workstation market demand." according to IWILL's homepage. I will take one, please."

Comments

Re:UMMMMM...

[drinkypoo]

By single-chip they are undoubtedly referring to a single die with two cores, or to the nForce3 chipset which presumably need not be separated into north and south bridges given that the memory controller is integrated into the processor, though I don't know if the nForce3 chipset is one or two chips. By the location on the page it certainly looks like they're talking about the chipset; the text is to the right of an nForce3 logo. In fact, the picture right below that shows two CPU sockets, so they MUST be talking about the chipset.

It is sometimes not enough to read the text of the article, you must look at the pictures too.

Re:UMMMMM...

[ruiner5000]

Because there are two Opterons in it. I was talking to Iwill about it today. Yes, single chip solution as in the nForce 3 chipset, as is common knowledge, integrates northbridge and southbridge functions into one chip which reduces latency, and improves performance. Single chipset, two CPUs, less valuable PCB space since no separate southbridge is required, less traces required, easier to make a smaller design. nforce 3 info.

Re:1xAGP - workstation?!

[coene]

I'm sure that meant 1xAGP as "one AGP slot". Not having AGP 8X would be suicide. It should even have PCI Express if it's going to take a few months to be released.

Opteron's may not produce so much heat

[ahmetaa]

AMD Opteron Processor Models 146/246/846 HE series produces only 50Waats and EE series produces 35 watts. this means even dual chips may produce less heat than a Intel Presscot P4. HE and EE series will be unveiled this year.

http://www.amdboard.com/opteron_low_power.html

Re:*drool*

[ruiner5000]

Opterons don't generate massive amounts of heat. You are either thinking of Prescott or G4 laptops.

Re:UMMMMM...

[canon006]

I believe that's one configuration that they're offering the system in, they show a pic on the page of a board with 2 sockets. I thought the same thing when I started reading, then the pics finished loading...

Re:Heat management?

[alienw]

Opterons run very cool. Mine runs considerably cooler than the P3-800 it replaced.

300W?

[dubiousdave]

The Opterons must use much less power than the Athlon64. I had to upgrade to a beefier power supply when I put in my Athlon64 mobo and CPU, and that's for a single CPU.

Re:300W?

[ruiner5000]

No, they use the same amount of power unless they are the lower power version of the Opteron. A quality 300 watt power supply can certainly handle to Opterons. You see that in servers all the time. If a 200 watt in a Shuttle or Biostar Athlon 64 small form factor can handle it, then 100 more watts, which is more than an Opteron draws is more than adequate to power a 2nd CPU.

Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[ruiner5000]

64 bit linux drivers have been out for the nforce 3 since last year. You can grab them here. Opteron 250's official AMD pricing is $851. Street pricing is near $1,000 only because availability is still low. As more vendors pick them up they will drop considerably.

Re:Heat

[cbreaker]

God, people keep posting this over and over. The Opterons aren't the AthlonXP's. The Opterons don't generate gobs of heat.

Re:Memory bandwidth.

[ruiner5000]

There is not chipset to memory link. All memory will flow through the processor hypertransport links. The question is will Iwill design it so it can take advantage of NUMA. Will each CPU have its own bank of memory? No telling yet. I'll try and find out more details from them.

Re:dual Athlon FX

[ruiner5000]

Up until now the Athlon 64 FX and Opteron are identical. That will change eventually. No, the Athlon 64 FX is not SMP capable. It just has the clock multiplier unlocked.

Re:dual Athlon FX

[DiscoOnTheSide]

actually SMP is the MAIN reason behind the Athlon and Opteron split. No Athlon SMP, sorry.

Re:Heat management?

[SD-VI]

Even the regular Opteron is no Xeon; typical heat output for a regular Opteron 244 is estimated at 58W (I believe Xbit Labs did the testing), and they've got Oversized Novelty Dies to spread that over as well (something like 193 square millimeters, courtesy of x86-64 and a 1MB L2 cache).

I suspect they're looking into low-voltage Opterons, though, which would mean even lower heat consumption. Max heat dissipation for the entire line of .13u Opteron HEs (LV) is 55W; consider that max heat dissipation for the entire line of regular .13u Opterons is, what, 89W and as I said heat dissipation under load for a normal (old-stepping, actually) 1.8GHz/x44 Opteron is 58W, and you're getting some pretty chilly-running chips. Max heat spec for the .13u Opteron EE (ULV) line is 30W, which puts it in Tualatin territory.

So yeah, reversing the trend towards hotter chips is a very very good thing.

Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[Wesley Felter]

The latest versions of Linux seem to support my nForce3-based SK8N well enough.

Re:Heat management?

[Sivar]

That would be cool, but they are really priced out of the workstation market. They are server chips all the way unless AMD makes them more affordable.

Er, the workstation market has traditionally been dominated by HP PA-RISC & Sun UltraSPARC-based systems, and other high-price hardware. The AMD Opteron 2xx series outperforms both and is several times cheaper.
Twin Opteron 242's are around $415 USD for BOTH, and that is for consumers. Even if manufacturers like Iwill didn't get bulk discounts, that isn't even a drop in the bucket for a professional workstation.

Re:Ummm, 1x AGP ????

[vanillacoke]

One AGP slot fool.

I'm surprised its shipping WITH one, opterons mobos almost always have Rage3d chips powering them.

Re:Heat management?

[ruiner5000]

No, you do not understand. I'm talking about pricing for the lower power version of Opteron. The 30 watt version of the 240 is $690. There are no higher speed grades of it available. 1.4GHz is all you get.

Re:Barbecue?

[ruiner5000]

Thank you Tom's Hardware for misleading everyone in the world who can't do their own research that AMD CPUs run hot. Good job guys. I tire of these posts about heat. They are ridiculous. Guess what everyone, I have an eMachines M6805 that I'm typing on right now. It is an Athlon 64 laptop, and it is on my lap, and it is not running hot. The current Athlon 64 desktop replacement chip is nearly identical in thermal properties to the Opteron, Athlon 64, and Athlon 64 FX. If I can have it on my lap, and not run hot, then I don't see a problem putting two in a lot more space that a small form factor provides. Anyone who still thinks it will run hot head to your local Best Buy and put your hand below this laptop. You will not suffer from 3rd degree burns.

Re:Heat

[NerveGas]

I've got a120mm NMB fan that pushes air at over 60 CFM, and you have to have your ear within a foot of it to even be able to hear it. One of those on the back of a small form factor case, blowing in, through, and out strategically placed slots would be far more than enough to keep it within an allowable temperature range.

steve

Re:SMP Gaming, quit it already!

[BlackHawk-666]

Doom III will allow the audio engine to run on a seperate processor. That may not be a huge gain in speed, but it is still some. Let's not forget, the OS will also be running at the same time as your game, and that could run mainly on the other processor. I'd expect maybe a 7% boost in performance from having dual proc even if the game wasn't optimised for it. Now, if they got some of the workload running asynchronously and in a seperate thread/process then we might see some real speed improvements e.g. graphics handling on one thread, calculating interactions, physics and explosions on another, sound on a third thread...etc.

Re:SMP Gaming, quit it already!

[NerveGas]

You're pretty much right, but soon won't be.

Doom3, however, is fully multi-threaded in order to support SMP systems. That means that the games which license the Doom3 engine will be multithreaded. And it also means that anyone who wants to challenge Id will also have to step up to the plate.

Earlier today, I heard someone moaning that the need to support multiple processers was useless baggage that would pull down the video game industry. Quite the contrary, increases in computing performance have always helped the video game industry, and the ability to tap into two processers instead of one is another way that they can increase their use of yoru CPU cycles.

There are a *lot* of simultaneoush things happening in a video game - in addition to the rendering and sound, you've also got to handle AI for a good number of characters, and physics for a (usually) large number of objects, and those are two things that can chew up CPU cycles.

Sure, it takes some work and intelligence to get all of the code to work together. But that's alright, that's how things have been improving for a long time now.

steve

Re:Barbecue?

[jmorris42]

> Good job guys. I tire of these posts about heat.

I love my new Athlon64 machine. But it does run pretty damned HOT. I don't really care about your laptop's heat output because guess what? It uses thermal management to throttle down the speed to keep the temp under control. Take a look at the AMD datasheets and watch how much the temp goes down with just a small downshift in clock. My 3200+ sinks the full 89 watts when it is compiling. The temp on the heat sink shoots up nearly 10C during a long CPU bound operation. And that is with the retail AMD heatsink/fan along with a 120mm fan side mounted over the processor area.

Another data point. The load meter on my UPS is only lighting up the first indicator right now with net radio cranking and a 19" LCD on. Start a CPU bound job and the second light will come on. And stay on even if the sound is stopped and the monitor switched off. Which tells me the difference between idle and full draw on the CPU is than the monitor and speaker system combined.

Re:so sick of x86.

[TheRaven64]

*yawn* wake me up when an interesting CPU architecture comes around, that is worth playing with ...

Okay. Or maybe you'd rather play with the reference board?

where are the dual-proc small form factor CPU-X(where X is anything -x86) mobo's these days?

Is Micro-ATX small enough? If you'd be happy with ATX, then why not play with a dual processor 64-bit MIPS system?

it sucks. nobody seems to be pushing the CPU envelope, cheaply any more... its all x86 hegemony

Oh, cheaply. Perhaps you should take a look at some products based on ARM chips.

There are a lot of interesting CPU architectures out there. The only reason not to be using one is the need to run Windows (and even then you can use IA64, although it's not cheap.)

Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[neutralstone]

$851 is AMD's official price for boxed CPUs for distributors, not consumers -- that is, it's priced for customers who buy 1,000 CPUs at a time (though you can also get single OEM CPUs at about that price from other vendors).

Also note that Monarch is pretty much AMD's top distributor for boxed CPUs. They sell it for $900, which seems like a reasonable markup.

But yeah, the $970 price tag from Computers4Sure is probably due to short supply. But I don't know why anyone would buy it at that price. I mean, we have Froogle, fer cryin' out loud. :)