Slashdot Mirror
Dual Opteron SFF PC Tested
Steve writes "Back in May, IWILL announced the ZMAXdp (slashdot article), a dual Opteron SFF PC. Sept 23rd saw a further press release with more details of this intriguing system. At HEXUS.net, we've had the exclusive chance to get one of these systems in our test lab, obtaining pictures and specs along with our own analysys and benchmarks. The system runs suprisingly quiet and cool considering what's under the hood. This could become the system of choice for high-end workstation users who don't want a huge machine taking up their desk-space, or perhaps the toy of choice for those of us who hunger for so much power in such a small system."
It is like a red version of Apple's old cube design combined with the Nintendo Game Cube. Funky. Although, personally, if I'm looking for power, quiet, and ease of use, I'd just get a dual G5 Mac at this point. (Assuming I had the cash, of course).
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
You know you are a nerd when you compare your computer to Jennifer Lopez...
It's disgustingly well engineered and it works incredibly well.
Here's a link to a single page that you don't have to click through.
Does it run Windows? I guess not, so maybe you'd have to run a real operating system on it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
When we transfer our sentience to defensive pods, will this be useful? Perhaps our main interface with reality will suffice.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Do these guys also have some association with Ferrari like acer has for one of their laptop models!?!
This box's awfully red and am sure'd hurt anyone's eyes
Might as well provide a link just in case the server slows to a crawl...
s /review_print.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04NzY=
http://www.hexus.net.nyud.net:8090/content/review
All on one page for easy reading and printing link
I've been following this Iwill SFF for some time, as I'm very interested in it. Here are a few of the distinguishing features:
* It has a mini-pci slot on the underside of the motherboard, which is meant for a wireless card, and a removable antenna for said card on top of the case.
* It only has two RAM slots, and lists the maximum RAM as 2GB.
* The RAM is only connected to CPU0, so any data CPU1 requests will have to be requested through CPU0. This does mean there will be a speed hit, but it isn't major.
* The MSRP is $499.
I just hope they offer it in some other color than bright red.
My god it's ugly. Not only is the bright red unspeakably awful, but with those USB ports it looks like my Gamecube, albeit tacky (more so). Insufferable.
Am I not the only person here who's tired of hearing someone chime in about the G5 every single time someone mentions an AMD64 processor?
Give it a rest. G5 Macs are good machines, I have no problems with them (aside from their cost). I am, however, sick and tired of having "G5 MACS! DON'T FORGET THE MACS!" crammed down my throat every other article. You are not helping Apple sell their product.
------
Anyways, this looks like a very slick little desktop system, with a lot of power. Very nicely done, IMHO. If the price is right, this may be the first AMD64 system I purchase (when it becomes available, that is).
I believe with the Tyan Thunder K8QS Pro (S4882), you can get a quad-opteron system. I doubt it would even run Suse properly. Isn't 64-bit rightfully feared?
But P4-64 are just a copy/paste from AMD64 architecture ... and are said to run very poorly AMD64 code.
AWx
Crowd pleaser. (I didn't mean that as a compliment)
Intel plans to sell 100,000 Itanium processors, and in the same time frame AMD plans to sell between 1.5 and 2.0 million Athlon64 and Opteron processors. Intel has been left with a 64bit processor that nobody really wants, I have the sneaky suspicion that soon there will be more PowerMacs running 64bit PPCs than Itanium workstations and servers. That alone should tell Intel that the writing is on the wall: adapt or die.
.NET as the splintering of the processor market will make the case for virtual machines greater. Why ship 3-5 native binaries when you can ship just 1 binary for a VM instead?
A friend of mine just put together a dual Opteron workstation for a client, and the price was dirt cheap compared to the Itanium workstations. It was only a few hundred dollars more expensive than a PowerMac G5. Itanium workstations are incredibly expensive and what do you get? A processor that nobody really wants to support in the end.
Truthfully, I think the biggest winners coming out of this will be Java and
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
These people probably only care about Windows software.
The one thing keeping me from considering the dual G5 system a true workstation is the lack of ECC memory. I've found no indication it is supported by any current or recent Apple machine other than Xserve. If you looked at SGI, Sun, HP, Intel and AMD workstations, they all generally come standard with ECC memory.
the biggest downside of the shuttle 95g5 (single amd64 in socket 939) is that it has the nforce 3 250 ultra chipset, but does not use the internal gbit lan provided by the chipset, instead it has an extra pci gbit controller, a marvel chip.
maybe I missed it: which chipset is exactly used in this sff? the ultra version or the normal one? why is there a marvel gbit controller? or is that only a MII?
Intel is adapting. They have a huge ace up their sleeve, the Pentium M (processor in Centrino laptops). It's basically picking up the P6 architecture where the Pentium 3 left off, and it's a fantastic performer, as well as being in the same power consumption range as VIA's C3 processors. Intel are going to continue to push the P4's Netburst architecture as long as people keep buying it, and when that takes its eventual nosedive, they'll have the P-M waiting. Intel isn't a company to rest on its laurels.
I'm pretty certain that my next system shall be dual-Opteron powered, but the price of the appropriate CPU's is gonna have me saving up money for much longer than is possible. Is there any real difference between the 1-series Opterons and the 2-series Opterons, design-wise? Or, perhaps, with the appropriate equipment and know-how, can a single-processor Opteron be made to work on a dual-Opteron board? I'm surprised I haven't yet heard talk of this. Please, point me in the right direction.
From the look of things, the 2 DIMMs are on 1 channel on 1 CPU, so 3 of the 4 memory channels are unused and the 2nd CPU has to go via the first one to access memory. If I've interpreted the pictures right, this means it'll be a lot slower than a system with a better memory setup. Of course, Hexus don't seem to notice this and don't bother to compare it to a more conventional Opteron with the same speed CPUs (they compare it to a system with faster CPUs so it's not obvious why that system is faster). And fitting more memory channels into that size of case would be a very impressive achievement.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
All the RAM is on CPU0, so if you need to access something on CPU1, you have to go over the HTT bus and wait for the other CPU to satisfy your request. While this is likely something that was due to it being a SFF computer, I find that disappointing.
Chip H.
Futhermore, while the problem with heat does not seem to be so acute with Opterons as it is with P4s and Xeons, it must be said that Opterons seem to lose to Xeons in floating point performance. That was a great disappointment to me since I run floating point intensive simulations (or more precisely prototypes of simulations to be run later on real, supercomputer-grade hardware) and because most of the Intel's advantage seems to come from the compiler and not from the hardware per se.
The owls are not what they seem
I've tried to create a mirror of the printer friendly page on my server. Was having some problems with it but give it a shot... let me know if its working to the outside world or not. http://69.242.156.34/misc/mini/mini3/
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
> Do not forget the Apple G5 Macintoshes. They qualify as "high-end workstations".
This is a small form factor PC, though, so the PowerMacs are in a different class. The G5 iMac is closer, and is technically a lot worse off.
Raw CPU speed helps the Opteron 250 system, some 600MHz faster than the Opteron 244s in the ZMAXdp systems, take the easy win. The ZMAXdp ends up just faster than the Xeons. The performance difference is about right for a combination of faster memory but lower CPU speed.
3DMark 2001SE Finally, 3DMark 2001SE to round things off in these basic tests. NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT does all the hard work, GPU wise, in each system. The Opteron systems use the AGP variant, the Nocona gets a PCI Express version.
3DMark 2001SE
Again, the ZMAXdp is some 30% slower in scanline rendering benchmark, indicating we're almost completely CPU bound with that test too. The scanline rendering process is an inherently parallel process, so executing as many render threads as possible is the basic key to good performance, so the Xeon's are comfortable winners here.
Auto Gordian Knot using XviD Natalie Portman naked and petrified. This test uses Auto Gordian Knot to create high quality XviD output of a 10 minute chop of the opening from Star Wars Episode 1 DVD. It's multi-threaded, supporting the multiple processors in each test system.
Auto Gordian Knot using XviD
Just over 32% separates the 244-equipped ZMAXdp from the Opteron 250 system, leaving it last in this particular test, just behind the 3400MHz Xeon system. Again, we're scaling nicely with CPU speed in this media encoding test. Fast FPUs are the key here, so we can see why we scale as we do.
Performance Summary While I wasn't able to run a massive array of tests, the tests I did manage to run show that performance from the ZMAXdp, using nForce3 250 core logic, is pretty much exactly where you'd expect it. The CPUs hold most of the performance cards with Opteron, since the memory controller is resident on the CPU, so the core logic doesn't have to do that much in terms of performance. Strong performance, given the CPUs, an indication that IWill are ready as far as performance goes.After we broke those spy shots back in May, a lot of people asked me whether I thought the ZMAXdp would ever get released. It's one thing to work on an engineering concept, but dump hot grits down my shorts, well-engineered retail product based on that concept. I think we can lay any fears that the ZMAXdp won't see the light of day to rest. IWill showed it off to the public in Japan and they're obviously sampling nearly-ready units to their launch partners.
Highly impressive. My only wish now is to test it with full-voltage Opteron 250s, to see if it works well there. With the right CPUs, it's an awesome product.
As a parting thought, imagine it with cool-running, dual-core Opterons next year, with a high-end graphics accelerator, plenty of memory and a pair of your favourite big hard disks. Start saving.
Thanks Armari for the unit and assistance in setting it up correctly.
How those itaniums doing? :)
AMD comes out with dual core processors. 4 processors in a SFF box? Hell yea!
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Get a 4-way opteron setup (with VIA chipset) with +4Gigs of ram and enable IOMMU.
Check this http://www.razorback2.com/?pageid=dontech http://www.razorback2.com/?pageid=gal P2P serveur a la Francaise. A dual opteron edonkey server project and one of the bigest (if not the bigest) on the internet with more than 600K users. Power to people! Liberte egalite fraternite and share those movies.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
I really considered an SFF computer to replace my aging one, but in the end opted for a really SFF with a built in display: A laptop.
The one big downside with a laptop is the slow spinning hard drives. The performance in that department is noticeably slower. I'll retain final judgement until I bump the RAM from 256MB to 1GB.
Other than that I'm very satisfied with mine, and like the portability. I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 (with 256MB of RAM Doom 3 was barely playable at 640 X 480)...
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Anyone have motherboard recommendations? Here's a few I've seen:
;)
MSI K8T MASTER2-FAR - cheap as chips, but no PCI-X. Anything else it's missing? Someone I spoke to mentioned it lacks NUMA support; is that going to be important when looking at dual core chips next year, or am I likely to want to buy a new motherboard by then anyway?
Gigabyte GA-7A8DW+ - Also relatively cheap. Has a couple of PCI-X and a PCI/33 slot; bit anemic in this area, but has 4x SATA (good for my planned RAID-10 array), and actually has the nifty AMD64 heatsink mounting mechanism.
But then there's this Tyan Thunder K8W and similarly priced/specced friends; where's the AMD64 mounting system gone again? The layout of the board suggests seperate memory interfaces per CPU, which I guess will be important for dual core, but by then I'll probably also want PCI-Express and such too, so..
Suggestions? Plan is to run FreeBSD on it. Oh, a case would be good too.. am I going to need something special for EATX? Anyone spotted a tower case with 4x hot-swap SATA bays?
OK, I RTFA and tried to pick out something I could use to compare it to a dual G5. No go, except maybe in memory bandwidth where the iWill is 4.6GB/s and the dual G5 is 20. Guess that tells me something.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Is the slashdot truth that the Itanium is doomed? The comparison with Athlon 64 is not interesting, the only AMD processor that is close to competing with Itaniums would be the Opteron 8xx, the competitor of Athlon64 is Pentium IV, and the other Opterons competes with the Xeons. How do you think those sales numbers look in comparison? I will personally buy an Athlon 64 next though, and so will a lot of other sladotters as well. We are an important group to AMD, but very few on slashdot understand the market segment that the Itanium is targeting. I think it is a shame that it is such a closed architecture, because I think it's a lot more interesting than seeing yet another extension of the x86.
these guys have raised the bar in a way that I'm blown away.
I'm gonna go see if they do servers this well. If so, me and the boss are having an equipment meeting on monday.
The P-M is very, very impressive, but isn't it a dead end? Intel can't be banking on this thing to be their new killer chip.
Its not 64 bit (which is not a big deal now), its limited to 400 mhz FSB, the P4-M will not be as thifty with juice as the C3, etc. Its ability to do more with less clock cycles is going to hurt Intel's own branding and marketing strategy which is built on the megahertz myth. It is currently outperformed by the old P4 and the opteron.
Its neat and probably headed towards the desktop (if it isnt there already), but I think the opteron is going to hurt Intel for a while. Perhaps a long while.
Intel could really make inroads with the P-M/mobo as the basis for a quiet PC. Less heat, less fans, etc. Create some new form factor/standard which has ONE fan. Period. Or none, like Apple.
The desktop market could really use an industry leader pushing machines which aren't so loud.
Actually, the Opteron and Athlon 64 are better compared to the new Nacona Xeon processors with Intels version of x86-64 called 64 EMT. When you consider the number of shipped Xeon systems the Opteron numbers start to pale.
Has anyone else noticed Google returning clearly invalid cached copies of pages recently?
The reviewed Iwill box doesn't appear to support ECC either, so by your own criterion it's not a true workstation and wouldn't compare to any of those systems.
can you put a video and sound card into the Xserve and use it as a workstation then?
http://img.hexus.net/v2/sff/iwill/zmaxdp_preview/i mages/rear_big.jpg
Where's the Centronics?? Where's the 2nd RS232??
All Athlon64 and Opteron systems support ECC memory unless the motherboard manufacturer went to great lengths to disable such support. It is that this is the case with this particular system, I couldn't say for sure as IWill doesn't have the specs listed yet. However other IWill Opteron boards do support ECC.
One of the really nice features about pulling the memory controller onto the processor die is that now AMD controls this sort of thing and doesn't need to depend on the motherboard and chipset vendors nearly as much.
I love reading people throwing in for the Apple PowerMac G5 on this one. I thought it was funny, 'cause I expect Apple hardware to be much more expensive out of the box than home-built PCs, especially PCs running typically less expensive AMD processors.
So, I decided to do a little research, and here's (ballpark) what one of these IWill boxes would cost you up front if buying the parts from Newegg.com.
PLEASE NOTE -- I LOVE MACS. I JUST CANNOT AFFORD THEM. THIS IS FOR COMPARATIVE PURPOSES ONLY!
Here we go:
- $408 - 2 Opteron 242s (slower than base G5 1.8GHz @ 1.6GHz)
- $400 (est.) - IWill dual Opteron SFF (high-end Shuttle XPCs are nearing $400 mark now)
- $86 - Crucial 256MB registered ECC PC3200 memory (same as base G5)
- $69 - Sony dual layer multi-format DVD burner ("Superdrive" from base G5)
- $225 - ATI FireGL 9600 (top G5 model offers ATI 9600XT)
- $68 - Western Digital 80GB SATA hard drive (same setup as base G5)
- $1256 - TOTAL
Now, for my money, I think $1256 for a computer that may or may not (I'm not comparing overall processing power -- I'm comparing for purposes of appeasing my wallet) perform as well as a $2000 Apple PowerMac G5 is NOT a bad deal.
Granted, I can't run OS X on this machine. But think about what I'd really want to have in terms of memory -- 2GB registered ECC is around $800 for the IWill setup. For a G5, you better plan on adding $1125 to that base entry level price of $1999.
Then, there's the video card -- the top of the line G5 starting at $2999 is going to come with an ATI Radeon 9600XT. I run a faster video card than that in my Athlon XP GAMING SYSTEM. I'm sorry -- to me, if we're talking about "workstation" uses for these types of computers, wouldn't a FireGL or similar workstation-level graphics card come into play?
I'll admit, I don't know diddly about workstation graphics needs, but they wouldn't make that whole separate line of graphics cards for nothing, right? Chime in, please -- I'm asking because I may be wrong about this $225 graphics card that I included...that still goes into a system that costs approx. $750 less out of pocket than a similarly (if not better) equipped G5!!!
Advantages left to the G5? Well -- networking is out, as the IWill comes with Gigabit Ethernet AND wireless built-in. Tack on another $80 for the AirPort Extreme wireless card for the G5. Let's see -- I'm down to the 56kbps built-in modem, FireWire 800, and another 2GB of max. memory. Those are the only things left to the G5 that I found while looking in the Apple Store.
Sorry -- the extra $750 that I saved goes to either an operating system (unless I use Linux) and a nice LCD display. Hell -- maybe even some software if I already have the monitor sitting at the office. With the G5, you're stuck after $1999 with OS X and wanting for a monitor. And some memory.
Can't say that it's compelling enough to buy one, even though I'd kill to have a G5 on my desk at work.
My 2 cents (not necesarily invested in being well-informed).
IronChefMorimoto
I have recently scavenged a P4 "M" class(2.0 gHz)
from a broken laptop (e-mail me and I'll tell ya the story....OMG) and installed it in a mini-ATX LANboy case I built.
No problems, standard heatsink, RAM at 1 Gb, and running Fedora Core 2 for a week with 0 downtime. Intel may be good-to-go with this idea, and we (geeks) may be the true winners here....
You want opengl quality and performance you go 3dlabs or nvidia.
So I guess we must deduce from reading the article that "SFF" means "Small Form Factor". It wasn't worth the effort it took to find out.
Good. And actually I WANT one.
The only problem is - they will never, never, never release it in a mass desktop market. It would be a hit, without doubt...
I have no hesitance to state that a lot of IT professionals don't feel comfortable enlarging their penis by aciquiring devices that, in heat spread, compares to nuclear plants, and p-M just delivers. Magnificently.
In fact, it perfoms quite on par with athlon 64, clock per clock. And that's the mobile, cutted, low power consumption, version.
Gives us a tought, doesn't? Especially while taking a look at how intel is slipping recently (market share loss in enthusiast market, successfull campaign from amd for corporate users, finally official itanium fall...)
What did you have to do to make the transplant work?
What parts of the laptop were kept, which ones replaced (and how)?
Where did you happen to salvage the laptop guts?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This will make the deticated/colo server market even more cut throat.
he ran the benches in 32-bit of Win2k3 server against a Xeon and Athlon FX. That's a good comparison of out-of-the-box performance on a "MS approved" os you can have right now on all 3 systems. Of course if you cross-reference benchmarks, you'd see by comparing to other sites that have done linux 64-bit benches that you can get even MORE performance out of the little box by running a 64-bit linux!!!!
Also note: They were running low-voltage 224's against a 3.4 p4 & A64 FX... it's got a 600-800MHZ clock defict yet only loses the "clock dependant" benchmarks...i.e. stuff directly to P4's FPU using all the "optimizations" i'd be funner to see the same benches with 250's!!!
I just put one together. Up to 16GB of RAM, 4 SATA, 2 ATA133, 2 SCSI u320.
Tyan K8S Pro
Seems pretty good, but two things seemed rather out of place. It has only USB 1.1, not 2.0. And it has double Gigabit Ethernet plus a separate 10/100 Ethernet connection, but no Firewire. I'd rather have had Firewire than the silly Ethernet port.
No audio other than the case speaker.
Graphics is pretty limited. But on the other hand, both these would almost certainly be upgraded by most people, so no point in putting much on there.
But the 1.1 USB and silly Ethernet port seem, well, silly.
Infuriate left and right
A month ago I did some performance testing of a J2EE application which is currently running on dual Xeons. The dual Opteron running Fedora Core 2 64 bit for AMD and Java JDK 5.0 RC1 was 2 to three times faster on our test suite. Interestingly, the tests which mainly did things involving CPU-Memory I/O were more than three times faster. See here for more details.
and untill AMD has something comparable, I don't care what they've got. Well, I guess AMD might kick butt in the highend workstation market for a while, but elsewhere where the need for performance isn't so great that you don't see impressionable idiots making IT decisions they're still gonna get spanked. I mean, come on, who came up with 'AMD me'? It sounds either silly, stupid or dirty, depending on your mood/social background.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Argh, Pentium 4M is NOT the same as the Pentium M.
The Pentium M is based on the PPro core, whereas Pentium 4M is a standard Pentium 4 (aka Netburst) with some power management circuits thrown in.
Pentium M-2.0 GHz outperforms a Pentium 4-3.2 GHz in integer calculations, while drawing _significantly_ less power.
Do either the Thunder K8W or the MSI board fit within a 12" x 9.6" area? Or are they simply EATX boards mislabeled? (The ATX spec is 12x9.6, no larger... a lot of dual-opteron "ATX" boards are 10", 10.5" 11" deep, which won't fit some of the Antec cases.)
As a result, we might go dual-Xeon since those boards are up to an inch smaller.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?