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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.
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.
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
Opterons don't generate massive amounts of heat. You are either thinking of Prescott or G4 laptops.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
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...
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
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
No, the cheapest Opterons are the 240s, and those alone would almost equal $499. I believe Iwill would prefer making a profit to losing a few hundred dollars a box. :)
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
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!
Longhorn.
One AGP slot fool.
I'm surprised its shipping WITH one, opterons mobos almost always have Rage3d chips powering them.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.)
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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...