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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>
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
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.
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.