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

Heat management?

[Radi-0-head]

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.

Re:Heat management?

[ruiner5000]

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.

Re:Heat management?

[alienw]

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

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:Heat management?

[ruiner5000]

No, you do not understand. I'm talking about pricing for the lower power version of Opteron. The 30 watt version of the 240 is $690. There are no higher speed grades of it available. 1.4GHz is all you get.

Re:Heat management?

[Sivar]

Ah, yes, that sucker is expensive, but it's a lot of CPU per watt, too (unless you consider Transmeta).
If only they were available for laptops. :/

Re:Heat management?

[MrZaius]

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.

A Computer that will fit Longhorn MIN. Standards

[Dozix007]

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.

I have a Idea!

[matlantis]

Nice now I can fit more of these motherboards in my jacket and then run like crazy out of Fry's

Re:I don't get it.

[irokitt]

Not only a cure for tiny cubicles, it doubles as a foot warmer!

open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[James4765]

Hope they've got Linux/BSD drivers for it - since MS still doesn't have XP 64-bit ready, and we all know that Nvidia won't release the programming info on the (very, very proprietary) chipset.

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>

Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[klevin]

Bummer about IWill using Nvidia. I was really looking forward to the the Nvidia chipsets, "back in the day." Unfortunately, the whole "no specs for you lot" bit put a damper on that.

Since this sort of purchase would be of the "my money, my choice" category, I think I'll go w/ one of the inevitable competitors who comes out w/ a similar design. This might work well for that home-brewed PVR I've been planning for the last two years. Now, if I could only come up with a source of income that would let me pay for it.

Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia...

[Omnifarious]

Those don't count. Where are the drivers I can trust?

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

300W?

[dubiousdave]

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.

Re:1xAGP - workstation?!

[ruiner5000]

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!!!

Re:Heat

[cbreaker]

God, people keep posting this over and over. The Opterons aren't the AthlonXP's. The Opterons don't generate gobs of heat.

Re:A Computer that will fit Longhorn MIN. Standard

[Jeremy Erwin]

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.

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:dual Athlon FX

[DiscoOnTheSide]

actually SMP is the MAIN reason behind the Athlon and Opteron split. No Athlon SMP, sorry.

Re:A Computer that will fit Longhorn MIN. Standard

[timmi]

"Actually, a computer that is truely drool-worthy will always cost $5000"-- Machrone's Law

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!

SMP Gaming, quit it already!

[Anubis333]

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.

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

Re:Barbecue?

[ruiner5000]

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.

Just so long as....

[NerveGas]

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

Re:so sick of x86.

[TheRaven64]

*yawn* wake me up when an interesting CPU architecture comes around, that is worth playing with ...

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.)