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NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Tyan's Words
CoffeeJunked writes "There's a lot of buzz about dual-core CPUs and with the release of the nForce Professional chipset from nVidia, there's a lot of buzz about the future of SMP machines as we know them. LinuxHardware.org has just published a couple of articles that get to the heart of the new chipset and what board manufacturers will be doing with them. The first article covers the chipsets and boards, while the second article is an interview with Tyan about what to expect from them this year. It's a good read all around."
Where are the SATA connectors?!?!?! I find it amazing that the K8WE only has 2 and the K8SER 4. While we're on the topic, having at least 1 PCIe x1 slot would be nice. These high end server boards are being outclassed by nForce4 SLI motherboards. (And for the record, using more than 4 SATA ports is very doable)
So, they are designing a chipset for servers, which will run linux or bsd, but they refuse to provide docs or hardware to linux and bsd developers, meaning their shit is always poorly supported. Hooray.
Thunder K8WE (S2895)
Thunder K8SRE (S2891)
Finally, NVIDIA's SLI has been a hot topic here because, as of yet, we haven't seen Linux drivers that support this hot new feature. When we talked to NVIDIA about this we were finally given a time-line which stated that it may be a couple of months still.
If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?
The picture doesn't label the other two. They're down by the SCSI controller pointing forward instead of up. They're also on the RAID with the ones in the picture.
Trust me.
(I have one of these boards at my desk.)
My mom says I'm cool.
Just a few years ago, Nvidia was practically unheard of in the motherboard market. They slowly crept in with the relase of nforce/nforce2/nforce3/nforce4 chipsets. Having an integrated video card and chipset is somewhat advantageous despite the driver troubles that linux users face. Nvidia is slowly gaining market share over motherboard chipsets, I see this as a good thing. My NForce systems are working great and so far everything has been smooth. If Nvidia keeps up with the great work and frequent updates of their chipset, I will be a satisfied customer. How do you feel about Nvidia presence in the motherboard market?
Can I config a dual-P4 machine to run X clients on one CPU, and my X server on the other CPU, with the nVidia machine displaying the server output? That's the kind of Linux multiprocessing I like.
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make install -not war
Normal view: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2327
All in one page/"print" version: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2327
Lots of intersting possibilities. Seems to me that given a motivated/visionary motherboard maker, the only real limits are based on the form factor. Is there a super-ATX out there that would allow for say 8 PCI-e slots, 16+ hard drives, and all the rest of the goodies, all in one case?
Some will ask if there really is a need for this. Anandtech's Derek Wilson points out that having all the onboard disk controllers could add up to substantial savings-- apparantly expansion card controllers are quite pricey.
Now, if only those Opteron 8XX processors didn't cost $8XX... (or thereabouts... you get the idea!)
"That one made a bit of sense."
Only if you think "trust me" should be the future model OSS should work under.
Makes you want to run out and buy a video card in celebration.
So which is it people? Principle or practical?*
*And remember there's no "do over". Choose wisely.
"We use our drivers to cheat on benchmarks, and if we released info for people to write a driver, it would show our hardware's not as good as we pretend."
RHELWS3u4 works very, very nicely on the K8WE with an Nvidia FX3400.
Maybe some of the vendors haven't publically released their drivers...
Be patient...
"How do you feel about Nvidia presence in the motherboard market?"
I feel a disturbance in the force as suddenly a thousand motherboard makers are snuffed out.*
*Jokes aside. the problem isn't with the chipset, but the attitude towards specs and other information that developers need that's being propogated. Today it's Nvidia. Next could be VIA. Then Intel after them, and so on down the line were if you want OSS to run on that hardware. It will not be on our terms, but theirs (DRM, Trusted computing).
nvidia SATA status and other Linux SATA info.
nvidia wrote the SATA driver that's current in the Linux kernel, and has generally been helpful in addressing problems that arise in it.
Although the ethernet driver ("forcedeth") was indeed reverse-engineered, nvidia eventually lent their support behind the effort: they contributed gigabit ethernet support to the driver.
The video stuff is still closed, of course.
"Although the ethernet driver ("forcedeth") was indeed reverse-engineered, nvidia eventually lent their support behind the effort: they contributed gigabit ethernet support to the driver."
Maybe. But the point is that they shouldn't have needed reverse-engineering. Video I can understand, but not an ethernet driver.
Dual core support on Tyan's Opteron platforms, is a feature we are very much looking forward to providing to all of our current and future customers. Unfortunately while its not possible at this time to directly comment on whether support will be implemented on the S2885, S2895 or other models from Tyan, customers should be pleased to know we are working to ensure compatibility on platforms going forward.
Dual cores are such a major upgrade, why buy any SMP motherboard when 2 months it cant support the next generation SMP cpus...
...who previously had an nVidia Go 5200FX (or whatever order those tokens are meant to come in), and now a Radeon 9000, I can only say I'd rather have out-of-tree drivers that work perfectly for a good card than half-baked drivers for an average card (where good/bad are measured in usability, not necessarily performance).
The Radeon under Linux (and I assume anywhere with an XOrg server) is a huge pain. Doesn't manually switch output displays with Fn+F8 like it should, and xv [the direct output mode, not the graphics program] only goes to the lappy panel, never to an external monitor. It might be a really trivial change in the driver source, but in the mean time it's an uneccessary frustration.
Sam ty sig.
If you check out the Tezro from SGI you'll notice it has 4 pci-x controller chips to get the throughput high enough for reatime editing of multiple streams of HD 4.4.4. I wounder if any of these configurations can handle that kind of thoughput?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
In a world full of cheap rush to production "enthusiast" motherboards packed to the gills with all kinds of generic no frills crap (i.e. cheap onboard sound, useless on board NIC's and 2 or even three cheap software RAID controllers), it's nice to know that my favorite motherboards manufacture is still producing quality rock-solid no-nonsense motherboards.
I've been a big fan since the pentium II days. Nary a reboot or even a hickup with these motherboards.
The only thing that concerns me is the Nvidia chipset and Linux compatibility.
Rock on Tyan!
I have a pre-release Dual Opteron/NForce machine from an unnamed manufacturer sitting right here next to my desk. We haven't finished benchmarking, but so far, it's wicked fast.
On one hand, they keep mentioning SLI, SLI, SLI.
On the other hand, These mobos are server mobos, loaded with stuff I frankly could do without, like SATA2 (IIRC, the fastest hard-drives out there are barely 50% of the way saturating a SATA1 link), Firewire, 8 memory slots and PCI-X.
What SLI croud need is a simple mobo with a simple feature set, a couple of PCIex1 slots, the two full x16's, the USB, audio, double GbE & the works as offerd by the 2200, and a couple of 939-pin sockets coming from a decent mobo maker like Gigabyte that doesn't charge double for it's badge (read: ASUS, TYAN, etc.)
All in a sub-200$ box.
Then all of us who can dish out the cash for an SLI setup accompanied by two (wish nVidia drivers supported more) monitors/projectors, crank up the resolution to max on both and enjoy the scenery.
That'll be the day.
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Excuse me? 32 bit Windows has been multiprocessor capable since WindowsNT 3.1 was released in 1993. Modern/recent incarnations are even better at it. Windows is no limitation to multiprocessing, today or in the future. Applications aren't even the limitation. Everyone running a modern OS (Linux/Windows/OSX) will benefit from Dual Core. Since even the most recent Linux kernel is almost completely preemptible, there's little reason to not move to dual core architectures from an application standpoint. EVERYONE will benefit.
Linux has been tested on as far as I know upto 512 processors. Kinda a lot more than windows well and truely tested.
Linux drivers are built with spinlocks. Windows problem could be the large set of home user single processor drivers how many have spinlocks in them.
I cannot remmber when linux became mult processor but would not have been far behind.(thinking it only started in 1991) Also I cannot rember when it first went 64 bit please not the Athlon 64 bit is not the first 64 bit chip that linux used.
Did anyone else read the summary title as NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Cyan's Worlds? No more Uru for me...
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
Besides, if SLI gaming is your big thing, two full x16 slots is overkill, and won't affect your framerates more than 1% at best. Two x8 slots will be plenty for anything around or on the horizon.
Sounds to me like you want one of the existing nForce4 SLI boards from Gigabyte, with a drop-in dual-core Opteron to go with it. All you need, nothing you don't.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
TaskManager can do this under Windows - the user can force any app onto specific CPU(s), and it won't migrate the app at all.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
AMD has gone to great lengths to make sure their dual-core processors work in current Opteron motherboards. The worst case would be that you would need to upgrade your BIOS, but the power requirements for these chips will be under the maximum that AMD has been telling motherboard makers to support.
The only downside is that they will always be behind in regards to clock speed compared to their single-core processors. I think somewhere in the 2.0 GHz range at initial launch.
Wow?
Just check out the work Yinghai Lu has been doing on LinuxBIOS for Tyan boards. He even has it working for nVidia Crush K8s based Tyan boards.
Your probably one of the idiots that modded me a Troll. But thats ok. I have too much Karma shit anyways.
xp can't do multiprocessing.
I know I am running it. It has alot of problems with the AGP. Alot of games crash it. Not very compatable with RAM. (check their website to find "authorized" ram models) the drivers that were supposed to fix this made it worse. They don't even uninstall cleanly! Their BIOS is Still in beta! This motherboard was released years ago. There is no excuse for this, it's a $500 motherboard
I don't mod, but thanks for calling me an idiot.
That article you linked to explicitly states that XP Professional is fully capable of SMP... There's nothing preventing Microsoft from doing a dual-core WindowsUpdate for those people who do install XP Home to enable dual core support, and nothing preventing them from releasing a service pack to OEMs to support dual core on default installs.
I'm don't remember seeing them state this will be a future policy, but their committment to support dual core as single CPU's for the sake of per-CPU licensing would seem to indicate that this is a future possibility.
But they will lose $$$.
First of all, if you think having to download binary drivers on a seperate machine, and burn them to a cd to install on your machine is not a problem, then you are retarded. Second, I do use BSD, and nvidia doesn't release any drivers. Third, I also use linux, and I won't use binary only drivers that could be hiding hardware problems, or creating security problems.
Considering everyone else can manage to release info for their chipsets, and if I buy any motherboard without nvidia shit on it I can use it just fine in all my chosen OS's, there is simply no reason to buy this crap. And if you do buy it, you are encouraging them to be ever more secretive and problematic.
Great, so there's all this extra POTENTIAL connectivity for devices and peripherals. Now where's the extra hardware interrupts and controllers to support a system with more than just a few of those things enabled at once? If we're still stuck in neutral with the same 16 interrupts we've had for almost TWO DECADES, what the heck is the point? Even the extra four "virtualized" interrupts created by my current motherboard (in Windows, at least) hasn't helped avoid interrupt conflicts. I've had to remove devices and dedicate another system to them because there simply weren't enough interrupts to support ALL the on-board devices and a couple extra PCI cards as well. So, would somebody please tell me WHY all this "advancement" is so important when we're still handcuffed with the same 16 hardware interrupts that were available in an IBM PC AT?
I don't understand. It's either: release software that works with dual core CPUs, or get replaced by software that does. Or ensure that only XP Pro gets installed on dual core CPUs, and I don't think that's going to be acceptable to OEMs fighting with tight profit margins.
They don't have a choice. Microsoft has the cushion to take the profit hit...