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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."
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.
I've been looking at this case for a good couple months now (before there were any pre-production versions available). The dual-processor aspect is definitely enticing; I'd like to run Gentoo on it with Windows installed on a virtual machine so I'm not up the creek when I need to use some Windows software.
What I have a harder time deciding is, do I want to go (dual) Opteron or (single) Athlon64. The market seems to favour the newer Athlon64s for desktop computers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's right for me. If I wanted to use Opterons, this IWill case certainly presents the possibility attractively (tight package, quiet, etc.) but the price/performance/growth numbers are proving a little more difficult to get my head around.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
I see nothing on that Microsoft link that prohibits this SFF computer from working with the XP-x64 beta.
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.
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
yes. unlike Intel's Itanium, the 64 bit Opteron is completely backwards compatible... 32 bit applications run natively on them.
I'm running on a dual Opteron w/32 bit Windows XP right now. :)
Agile Artisans
Dual G5 Macs aren't quiet. This is a point of much consternation in Mac forums--with Macs seeming to be ideal for audio work, many are puzzled that Apple doesn't build a truly quiet machine for that niche.
For somethine really quiet, it looks like your best bet now is to build something yourself. Start with cases and power supplies and cooling from Zalman. Their external water cooling system looks particularly nice, and easy to install.
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.
If you are considering a dual opteron with Gentoo and vmware because you still need windows, forget it!
Get two Socket 754 athlons (3000-3400ish) and put Gentoo on one, Windows on the other.
It's much more practical... you could load the Linux machine with storage (software Raid5 with SATA drives) and maybe put a Raptor in the Windows machine (which could be a SFF for LAN parties, if you like)
Thats what I do... a Gentoo AMD64 syste as a web/file server, a Winddows one for games. Both double as workstations.
You can either use a KVM switch or preferably go with Synergy if you have dual monitors.
The unofficial
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.
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.
Funny you say that. My dual G5 is the loudest machine in my office (barring the servers, of course!), and stays that way pretty often. I guess I'm using it "flat out" a lot. It *is* nice and quiet when I'm not using it. When processing audio or video, compiling, etc. it's a freakin' jet engine. Since I do a LOT of that, it's pretty annoying. And OMG, does it generate HEAT on my legs when I'm using it! The Dell under the desk is *much* quieter and cooler...
- Think of it as evolution in action -
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.