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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)
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.
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!)
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.
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.