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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."
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?
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.
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.
I'm a bit concerned about the nforce4, from what i read already, there are 3 models, a "normal" nforce4, a "ultra" nforce4, and a "sli" nforce4. But altough you can't use SLI on the non-sli models, there are ways to enable SLI, on at least the ultra model ( http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2322/ ).
To quote the article, "Just as quickly, we learned that nVidia was not happy with this "SLI hack" and they changed their drivers quickly so that "semi-SLI would not work with current and later Forceware drivers." It appears that the later Forceware drivers check the chipset ID and if the driver sees "Ultra", then SLI is not enabled. MSI decided to kill the "semi-SLI" board because it would be a nightmare supporting a board that would only run with older nVidia SLI drivers."
So, how will this be (un)supported by the opensource community? Is nvidia doing to chipsets what they did to graphic cards? Everyone remembers how they locked out rgb overlays and unified front+back buffers from the geforce4 cards, altough the chips had the funcionality built-in, the drivers would disable these features, and save them for the more expensive quadro cards (there were some quick fixes for this, for windows, mainly rivatuner and softquadro4).
Does this means that now they're going to lock-out funcionality available on the chipset to maximize profit? I can't imagine how (linux) kernel developers will support a chipset which relies on closed drivers to enable or disable a specific funcionality, and judging by nvidia's attitude in the graphic cards department (which has a point, up to a certain extent nevertheless), i can't imagine nvidia releasing the specs for opensource drivers for this chipset, therefore loosing the income from the sli model, which would become redundant.
Do we now have to taint the kernel with chipset drivers? If so, i'm out of it, this is certainly a chipset to avoid.
Why the fuck, oh why, oh why, cannot these damn onboard RAID or Hardware RAID chipsets provide a standard IDE emulation interface so that volume one, consisting of a RAID 1 mirror of physical disk 1 and 2 appear as one logical disk 1 to the Operating system? WHY!?!?!?!?!
& St ore_Code=ADPS&Product_Code=EzRAID&Category_Code=EZ _FAMILY
I'm set to dump my Promise SuperTrak for an IDE enclosure with built in mirroring that presents the disk as a single IDE mirror. I'm sick of being unable to do kernel upgrades because my vendors driver is randomly incompatible with certain versions...
I could understand needing a driver for management capabilities, but the Linux driver for the Supertrak doesn't implement those...
http://arcoide.com/miva/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD
Perhaps. But I think another possibility is that the nForce3 chipset was not meant for "budget/mainstream" users, but for "enthusiasts." As we all know, enthusiasts don't want integrated graphics that share memory with the system.
The nForce4 chipset, on the other hand, does look like it's aimed at budget/mainstream users as well as enthusiasts. But with PCI Express and TurboCache, NVIDIA might have a cheap solution that's better than integrated graphics.
PCI Express x16 has more bandwidth than AGP (4 GB/s upstream and downstream) and allows writes directly from the GPU to system RAM. This allows a non-integrated graphics card to share memory with the system without the huge performance hit that AGP would have caused.
Instead of integrated graphics, maybe NVIDIA is planning to "bundle" their cheap TurboCache cards with nForce4 motherboards. That seems cool to me.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Waaaay agreed! I had previously only run Pentiums because the AMD systems I built for other people (pre-nForce) were always flakey (although I have had good luck with VIA/Pentium platforms. Go figure.).
Then I built and AMD box with a nForce chipset.
And it rocked!
And I built another one. And another one. And another one. Some weirdnesses with the nForce chipset aside, the boxes were as stable as any of my Pentium boxes (maybe even more stable). That's including Intel chipsets in Intel boxes.
So now I'm waiting for the K8WE to be released so I can build my own AMD box.
The chipset is way overlooked, and is just as much a part of an uber box as anything else.