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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."
I'm extremely curious how they figured out how to manage the heat generated by TWO processors while leaving room in that tiny box for anything else.
Regardless, my boxers are wet. Must have one.
This would be one sweet gaming box. I wonder if the new nvidia cards will fit. Anyone know of any other chipsets coming out that are similar?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that do not.
I guess I can understand wanting to create something like this and even a few geeks wanting one but I really don't see the need for workstations. Maybe it's the cure for tiny cubicles though.
vampirical
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.
Nice now I can fit more of these motherboards in my jacket and then run like crazy out of Fry's
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>
It is sometimes not enough to read the text of the article, you must look at the pictures too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
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.
"Single chip" is referring to the chipset, meaning no separate Northbridge and Southbridge chips.
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
The "solution" uses a single chip, as opposed to many components. ZMAX != Opteron, mmk?
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
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...
Sure, if that spec is true, they screwed themselves out of the market for a graphics workstation. However, most developers don't need anything more than AGP 1x. I know many who would love a powerful small form factor box like that.
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.
Thank you. Drive through.
otherwise here is the text...:
------- In the end there are no begining
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
First we get paint jobs, then windows, then neon and now.......Wings and fins on a computer case. Yikes.
Probably not a good product? Isn't that complete speculation? Why not wait for them to reveal more details at Computex in a week?
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.
God, people keep posting this over and over. The Opterons aren't the AthlonXP's. The Opterons don't generate gobs of heat.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Remember, Longhorn isn't going to come out for another couple of years, so most of those standards were intended to staunch shortsightedness.
"Why would someone want to do X? It requires hundreds of gigabytes of disk space, and runs poorly on anything less than gigabit ethernet."
By 2007, most any new system will exceed those requirements-- so if a new user wants to perform task X, they will be able to.
available? maybe but cheap enough for joe blow to buy it? nope. 2007: welcome back to the day of $5,000 computers
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
The $499 price seems too low to include the processors. Is this the barebones price, processors sold seperately?
Bill Machrone wrote in a recent article in PC Magazine that the computer you Really want will always cost $5000
the forst 286, 386, and 486 systems all cost $5000 when they were forst released.
And today, the really drool worthy computers cost $5000. just look at any of the Botique(sp?) gaming box makers. Heck, an Apple Dual G5 2.0 and a 23" studio display is $4998 Plus tax!
One of the features supposedly included in Apple's System 10.3 release was a video codec that required a 1 GHz G4 for proper playback. That requirement certainly exceeded the capabilities of older computers, but most, if not all of the current Apple lineup exceeds this requirement.
Am I pissed that my long in the tooth g3 ibook can't use this feature? No. It's just a video codec, and by the looks of things is rarely used. Besides, my newer computer is perfectly capable of such computations.
My guess is that in 2007, if you buy a new computer with MS's new OS, it will be able to run most all of the new features just fine. And it won't cost more than $1500.
www.signalnine.com has often had stories appear months before they appear on /.
Of course, we also don't post too much stuff normally, so it's I suppose a bit of one or the other.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
I read 1x AGP and I think terminal... This is not a game worthy machine???
/. effect...)
Is this just me??? Does that simply indicate that there is only one AGP slot... not the speed of the AGP bus?
Somebody fill me in here, I must be missing something.... (and I would read the article but for the
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Longhorn.
THANKS for being a karma whore, Frys displays all thier SFF cases and mobos....
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
Why do all the OCer's and Gamers always drool over Dual proc boards? There are *very few* SMP capable games at all. This is one huge old myth I would like to dispell for these people. To my old gamer knowledge, only ID and maybe a few other people have made SMP capable game engines, and then, they weren't fully SMP capable, and it only mattered if you used software rendering. There have been one or two SMP game servers.. Adding another processor is virtually useless for a 'gaming machine' unless you want to be running Seti@Home one the other processor while you're 'fragging' or whatever you kids are calling it these days.
I can only think of a few uses for a dual processor machine for '1337' gamers and OCers and it's things like restricting apps to individual processors, if you *must* encode the latest DVD you rented from blockbuster while teaming up in a death match -and most people don't know this is possible. There are though more than a few SMP capable DVD ripping/encoding apps, but it hardly justifies two opterons.
These things do look great for rendering though.
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.
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.
Yeah! Thats so cool! And then you could run all your mission critical programs and your 64 bit programs side by side in Win... Oh... Wait...
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
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.
I already have. I have a laptop on my lap, not a radar gun catching speeders. Knowledge will set you free.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Sign me up, Bitch!
Of course, next year, dual opterons will be available on a single chip. But.. Sign me up, Bitch!
Even so, it's still insane. The fact that it will take multiple 3GHz+ cores to let you do the same tasks you can do right now with a single 1GHz core is just silly.
It's like saying "Oh, it's not a problem that this car has an extra two tons of useless weight. After all, we can just throw in one of those huge V10's!"
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I hope you are not referring to the articles from ~1.5-3 years ago where they proved an Athlon burns up bad compared to a Pentium 4. Because, actually, those were the articles that made AMD and motherboard manufacturers catch up to Intel's awesome ability (at the time) to make thermistors do their work and actually shut down a motherboard before thermal runaway. If that is your only beef, they are both (Intel and AMD) at harmony in that respect (ability to thermally shut down in timer of danger, danger, will robinson) now.
I wish I had the board in question. then I would be busy playing quake rather than being sad that I didn't get FP
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sure, in those common cases where your heatsink falls off your motherboard. Man, happens to me 6 or 7 times a day.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
it it comes with 64/66+ pci... that and an ATX form factor would be perfect... thanks.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
There has not been a chipset made in years that supports only AGP 1X. There is no Opteron chipset that supports less than 8X.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Send me a link to a place where I can buy XP64. Oh wait, you can't...
My other car is first.
The way the spec read in the article, it said '1xAGP', not '8xAGP'. So, I assumed that something like an AGP 8X Radeon X800 wouldn't work.
Everything else you mentioned is exactly what I would do as well, and should be possible with that box. And the spec listed probably meant 1 AGP 8x slot, not 1 AGP 1x slot. So, given that, it sounds like a nice machine.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
*yawn* wake me up when an interesting CPU architecture comes around, that is worth playing with
where are the dual-proc small form factor CPU-X(where X is anything -x86) mobo's these days?
it sucks. nobody seems to be pushing the CPU envelope, cheaply any more... its all x86 hegemony, or bust. booo-o-ring.
one thing that the 8-bit days have that is still not happening in this wonderful 'gonzo era of 32-bit' is variety. spice. having an oric-1 and a c64, now -that- was naughty!
not trying to flame, seriously. as a coder, i'm just not inspired by x86 hardware any more...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyway, 2 case fans (80 or 90mm, I forget which & don't care) were sufficient to solve the problem. The IWILL case should have some sort of directed cooling, and it will do fine. Also, by comparison my dual p3 overheats more than the opteron ever has. Also, mobel versions of chips scale the clock & are often parts that require less power in the first place.
the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back
Assuming we're thinking of the same report, that was a report of speculation from another site as to what MS was going to recommend by way of specs for Longhorn.
I don't recall having seen any confirmed official specs yet. It's funny how these things get accepted as fact without any substantiation...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sorry bout the formatting. Forgot to hit preview but the data is there. Note: This is with the STOCK CPU fan and heat sink. temp1: +93 F (high = +90 F, hyst = +32 F) temp2: +96.8 F (high = +176 F, hyst = +167 F)
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1. They weren't supposed to be minimum specifications.
2. They weren't real anyway.
If you're referring to PearPC, you're not going to run Mac OS X on that thing "as fast as a G3 imac". Running Mac OS X on PearPC is unuseably slow.
No, if you want the to "enjoy the awesome features of the OS X user experience", you'll still need a Mac. You'll be able to run Doom III just fine natively on Mac OS X as well...
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?
No Athlon SMP huh?
l
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk7.htm
Righto.
Aw, come on
/. can send as much traffic to a site in an hour as it might otherwise receive in a month. Why should admins shell out for the kind of bulletproof hosting Microsoft and the BBC have just in case a /. editor decides their site is worthy of a mention?
A link on the front page of
On a subject of as much interest as 64-bit computing, if this topic had been linked instead back upon itself, Slashdot might have slashdotted itself.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
No, you can't buy it, but you can download it for free.
On top of which, it'll be some kind of liquid-based cooling system, maybe using a heat pipe.
You have such a wonderfully nice way of pointing out mistakes. I bet it's a real hit with the ladies.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
As for the G5, you should really look into getting some more memory-- a gig or two should get you started, though you'll probably be able to use a few more when Apple releases a 64 bit OS.. (The OS won't consume that much RAM, but it will make it easier to write programs that take advantage of it.)
Since Apple is offering $500 rebates to people who buy 23" displays with G5s, you should be able to afford 1-2 GB of memory. Not much, but it's a start. And that Radeon 9600-- better replace it with a current model. Remember, the 9800 will soon be ready for the scrapheap-- or the thrift store.
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I suspect that the webpage linked to was designed more by a marketing person than a tech person - I can't believe they would only have a 1xAGP slot. I think they just mean there is only 1 AGP slot. Because, games aside (it's not their target market anyhow - they are targetting the Workstation Market), if it *truly* has a 1x AGP slot, that would kill it for any kind of CAD/CAM, 3D visualization, 3D graphics design (like the people who create all the 3D models for games, movies, etc).
In otherwords, for a lot of the Workstation market, 1x AGP would be a huge problem in a WS design.
Oh goody. A trial release which will expire! Great! Really. I'm not brain dead enough to not know about 64 Linux. But the problem is its not feasible at this point, its only great for clustering. Linux doesn't have the software software for 64 bit. On the Mac side we're already seeing 64 bit enhancements for Photoshop. On the Linux side... there is no Photoshop. And GIMP is no Photoshop. All the powerful programs that really use 64 bit capability aren't for Linux, perhaps besides a few 3D renderers. Sure, you can use WINE, but programs under WINE are still 32 bit. Mac OS X is currently the only feasible 64 bit platform for professionals and not script kiddies in their basement compiling for 64 bit just for the cool factor. I'll go prepare to be modded -1 troll now...
Antec now sells a Micro ATX case fry's/compusa 114/129 dollars. MSI Dual Opteron board would cost you around 200. So for 314 (Even less than a Shuttle SN85G Athlon 64 machine.) you get a quiet case (That can even have watercooling with a external set)
The Micro ATX ones also have 3 PCI 1 AGP slots.
However I'm still waiting on faster SATA and PCI Express to make it's way into these motherboards before I decide to upgrade. And I'm still hoping that AMD will make athlon 64 dual proc chips.
The front look like the front of a Panasonic GameCube Q with his 4 leded plug on it.
-- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
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> No, it means your UPS plays it safe and doesn't disengage from a
> high load status
I think you are confusing a real UPS (a very rare and expensive animal) with what APC markets under that name. But instead of going into all that technical detail I'll just ask you to take a look at my displayed url and consider what I mean by long CPU bound jobs. As in I start a compile running, switch off the monitor and go to bed. In the morning when I check in on it I know that if the UPS is showing two lights the compile isn't finished and there is no need to light up the screen unless I want to work against that kind of load.
Democrat delenda est
Hold on there, pardner!
I have it on great authority that many, many unixy type folkses have been running all sorts of applications over X (They keep wanting to call it the X Window System or some sort of techy name) for many years now. I'm pretty sure that they didn't have "hundreds of gigabytes of disk space" or "gigabit ethernet" back in the day...
Maybe you are making a comment with the "runs poorly" part...
Given the $$ and watts consumed by these pigs,
I'd much rather have a dual athlon system.
Is there anything out there in an SFF box?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
So, have you tried exporting a VLC display window over 10baseT?
Somehow, I feel posting a link on the front page of ./ could be called Slashdot-Kiri.
There are sites that specifically forbid their membership to post links to that site on Slashdot for the express reason that the website will go down or cost a lot of money.
Sorry, but you're wrong... OS X has a 64 bit base. Sure all the libraries are not 64 bit, but that DOESN'T PREVENT YOU FROM COMPILING YOU PROGRAMS 64 BIT OR YOUR OWN LIBRARIES and running them on OS X. I've already compiled my game framework to be 64 bit, and it runs on OS X in 64 bit. Adobe has already released special extensions for the G5 for 64 bit for Photoshop. Photoshop built specially for the G5 exists right here, right now.
That is too bad that there is no 64 bit OS for the G5. So I would guess that means it is not a feasible 64 bit platform then is it? Not only is it the 3rd 64 bit workstation released, it has the worst marketshare.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Perhaps you should read my reply to the other guy. OS X is 64 bit. The libraries on it are not. You can compile your own 64 bit libraries. You can compile your own 64 bit programs. And run them side by side your 32 bit programs. I have already tested my game engine in 64 bit on the G5. Until 10.3 Apple had two different builds of OS X. One for the G3/G4 and one for the G5. OS X is not yet FULLY 64 bit but that doesn't stop you from running 64 bit programs on it.