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...

[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.

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:Heat management?

[alienw]

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

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: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: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: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