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NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Tyan's Words

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the smp-juiced-up dept.

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."

6 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. The boards look great, except... by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:The boards look great, except... by lachlan76 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      High end servers sure aren't gonna be using SATA...

    2. Re:The boards look great, except... by jred · · Score: 4, Insightful

      CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.

      SATA rocks, though.

      --

      jred
      I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
    3. Re:The boards look great, except... by dasunt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.

      Depending on the task, the CPU for PATA/SATA isn't that bad.

      For fileservers, on a price/capacity ratio, SATA will kick SCSI's ass to the curb and back. While SCSI is faster, and, on average, more reliable, SATA is often 'good enough'.

      Or imagine a webserver with huge amounts of memory. For performance, SATA and SCSI will be roughly equal, since most files will be cached in the memory.

      What about a DNS server: Again, the performance of the system should be dependent on memory, not the hard drive speeds.

      Don't forget firewalls. SATA is fast enough for log files, and the CPU shouldn't be a bottleneck unless your firewall rules are extremely complex.

      I wouldn't use SATA in a database server or in any other application with a lot of random disk reads/writes, but it has its uses, even in servers.

  2. Talk about useless. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. I'd at least respect honesty. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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."