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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."
Well, the specifications of the Board and proccessor capabilities (which are very nice), may fit the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back. Maybe we will be able to hit their recommended standards in three or four more years.
They haven't released dimensions yet. Also you can put 4 Opterons in a 1U server, so why not two in a small form factor? Remember there are also low power variant Opterons. With some good ventilation it could put the PowerMac G5 to shame, and amazingly still cost much less.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Guess the $499 is no memory, processors, drives, or whatnot - but it's still cheaper than the Tyan or MSI mobos. Just gotta save up the $2000 for the Opteron 250's...<grin>
Well, it does look like a GameCube, like a glowing white hot GameCube.
Get Mame, Snes9x, and emulators for ~10 other game consoles, plus the latest PC games on there, and you have the ultimate gaming box, sans current home consoles.
It wouldn't look out of place in a living room either.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
That's funny because it shows 4 DIMMs, which presently means you could put 8GB of memory, 4GB if there end up to be only two in the final design. Yeah, also you can put an AGP 8X Radeon X800. Or even a FireGL. Aren't those fast video cards? Wait, there is more. RAID, in fact two Raptors in RAID 0 sounds good to me thanks to two hard drive bays. Not to mention the driver level Firewall and enhanced remote management capabilities of the nForcer 3 250 Gigabit ethernet. Yeah, come to think of it who would want that in a workstation. I mean you could put in two 2.4GHz Opteron 250s. That is over kill. Heck, for that kind of money you could buy half of a PowerMac G5 dual 2.0GHz box. And the cool thing about the PowerMac is that it is three times larger!!!! Sweet!!!
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
I am curious, will this chipset support having independant pathways to the RAM, or will it share the ram thru the main CPU via the hyperlink stuff?
I am asking this because one of the big advantages of having a Opteron is that they have their memory controllers built into the chip. That way you can have a bank of memory for each CPU and get significant performance advantages over cheap motherboards that share their memory...
when are we going to see a dual Athlon FX board? Does FX even support SMP? I'd put money down if I could get today's equivalent of an Athlon MP system from two years ago.
Athlon MP pooped out with the MP 2800, the Opteron are very server-ish, so gimme a good ole SMP Athlon FX system, thank you very much.
Yeah, but it is going to be hard because that means you need to use the AMD PCI-X HyperTransport chip which will take up more board real estate. That same chip handle PCI-X functions in the G5 PowerMac by the way. You won't find Apple telling anyone that though.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Just so long as they actually give you a set of memory slots for each chip. Some companies (Tyan) have put out quad-boards that only have memory slots for two of the chips. It'll work, and it saves a lot of real estate, but then you're completely losing one of the greatest strengths of the Opterons.
steve-O
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Actually, back in 1992, the computer I really wanted was $10,000. It was a 486DX/33 with 64 megs of RAM, 1 gigabyte hard disk, and a 1 gigabyte tape backup - unbelievably huge at the time.
I'm soooooooo glad I never bought one.
One of my coworkers in about 1994 had spent some thousands of dollars on a motherboard with 64 megabytes of sram as the main memory. Insanely fast at the time. But again, I'm soooooooo glad I didn't buy one.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Processors they can handle. These SFF producers put a ton of work into figuring out proper CPU cooling. What I'm most worried about is that they're billing it as having "two hard drive bays." (note, however, that I'm quoting the /. post, not the article, so maybe they're not.)
I've got a Shuttle XPC with two 7200rpm western digital IDE drives and a pioneer dvd-+rw drive above it, and they're the chief trouble makers in my box. If I could just remove the middle hard drive and replace it with a fan, or even an unused floppy or flash card-reader, it would cut the number of hardware-related crashes I experience by more than half.
In the article, Iwill says they're pushing this towards media producers. They don't settle for 7200rpm IDE drives. If they're seriously advertising this as working well with two hard drives, they'd better build some decent cooling into the drive bays, as those folk are likely to want much faster and warmer drives than mine.
Tyan only has 2 models of quad-Opteron boards and both of them have memory slots hanging of all the processors (and they're massive). As far as this system goes, motherboard makers have a tough time making a NUMA capable dual Opteron board small enough to fit in a standard ATX case, how do you expect to fit one in a SFF?
For the initial release of PearPC, you are undoubtedly correct. If you care to check more recent releases, you are somewhat less correct. Initiall release was about a 500:1 speed ratio. Current releases show about 40:1 speed ratio, now using recompilation techniques instead of CPU emulation. I strongly suspect the dynamic recompilation engine has a lot of room left for optimization at this point also. Give this project a bit more time to mature and it may well turn into a very usable product.
When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong.
Actually, I can tell you from experience that UT 2004 is SMP... but not in the way you may think. I have noticed whenever I am running a listening server and playing a match (with people connecting to me) it spawns the servers processes on my second processor and leaves the first processor handling the game. Both use about 30 - 55% of my CPU (no prob since it's the only thing I'm doing at the time).
:)
I have also noticed this in the single player mode which leads me to believe it's doing the same thing (except not taking incoming connections). Coupled with a FX 5600, and I can host up to 20 players (bots or not), run 1280x1024 and still not lag.
Also with today's OS's becoming more and more optimized for SMP there is always a reason to drool over new and faster hardware: we're all geeks at heart.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."