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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."
Thunder K8WE (S2895)
Thunder K8SRE (S2891)
Well the nForce Pro 2200 and 2050 each have 4 SATA ports, so a 4 chip solution could have 16 SATA connectors on the motherboard. Why a motherboard maker doesn't try and fit on the connectors I do not know.
Sorry but 10K rpm SCSI drives (not to mention 15K) pound even Raptors extrememly hard in the performance arena. Look it up. No, here you go:
n dmax10/index.x?pg=4
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/maxtor-diamo
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.
What fool modded this up?
Mod parent down down down.
It's not true in any way. SATA is not faster than SCSI in any benchmark. More convenient? How in the hell is SATA more convenient than SCSI? That's like saying your right sock is more convenient than your left sock...wtf? Then the poster goes on to mention that the "asus k8n delux nforce motherboard has 8xSATA." And that makes SATA a better choice than SCSI in what way? Oh because your "workmate just got 1" and it is and I quote "SWEET". WTF is happening to slashdot when drivel like this is getting modded up?
I fear as the average age of slashdot users goes down so does the quality of posts. Slashdot is slowly turning into the forums at HardOCP.
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!)
You don't have to. It all happens transparently: I have a dual-CPU athlon MP setup at home, and I can confirm that it happens just like that. Each process starts on the processor with the least loading.
Quote: 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.
Of course you can, this isn't a NVidia, Intel or AMD thing, its a Linux thing. The operating system is responsible for deciding which processor to assign the work too.
Gamblers Forum
If you really know anything about high end workstations and server design you would never ask why there are notmore than 4 sata connectors. When it comes to servers sata drives are used for storage of data that is not accessed often and scsi drives are used for data that needs to be easily available. Too bad serial scsi is not out yet but that will come too. Plus 4 sata connectors give you way over a terrabyte of storage and that would be enough for the kind of application that you are thinking about. After all this is not a storage array.
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.
If you buy a SATA drive you can expect the same relability as a IDE drive. An exception is WD Raptor that has a MTBF of 1.2 million hours full duty cycle, like SCSI drives.
Many operating systems have a concept of processor affinity, whereby due to caching issues wish to ensure that thread/process migration from CPUs does not occur. WindowsNT once had a problem whereby you could ensure that after every context switch your thread had migrated to a new processor, invalidating it's cached data and killing performance. Some applications require this sort of thing, and if you want to ensure that this migration behavior occurs as little as possible, then you can set affinity flags that clue the OS into this fact. It will then attempt to migrate your thread only as a last resort.
So, Windows can do this, even though it's only a guideline, as opposed to a true enforcement. I understand Linux has this capability, however I'm not positive.
I've got a SuperTrak (the 12 drive version) running on a Linux 2.4 server running Debian. Make sure you enable the non-Windows OS option on the card (changes it to I2O operation), and turn on I2O options in kernel config. Works like a charm.. appears as one device.
CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.
That completely depends on the controller used. SATA unlike PATA, can easily reach or exceed specs for SCSI in terms of speeds/latency/load.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?