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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!)
"Only if you think "trust me" should be the future model OSS should work under."
it's worked so far...
"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."
"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.
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.
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.
I don't know what you're talking about. Bundling nice and important features (increasing value) is a good thing. Cheap onboard sound? Most these motherboards have 8 channel digital sound. A comparable creative (no thanks!) sound card cost almost as much as the motherboard alone. Useless onboard NIC? I don't know which ones you've tried, but I have yet to see one give me problems, from crappy ECS K7S5A motherboards to nice GBit lan on Asus boards. They just work. Cheap software RAID? If you want hardware RAID, go buy a "real" controller. It'll cost you a LOT more than the whole board does. For a lot of people, it's VERY valueable. No more promise-brand cards to buy that cost more than the mobo to do that. What's next? "I don't want no crappy onboard USB2? No Firewire?" I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe right now. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have nice things on them like 16x SATA RAID, SATA2, 2x GB LAN, 802.11g, IEE1394B, 8 channel digital audio (depending on which one you like better). Might look like crap to you, but it sure looks like a lot of nice stuff to me. And no, I'm no "enthusiast", overclocker, nor gamer. It's just a nice board with everything one needs or just about. No need to buy a bunch of 100$ PCI cards to have a complete system.
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You never did listen to the "output" of onboard-Sound, didn't you? I still like my PCI-Sound cards for the better sound (and yes, they cost almost as much as the mobo) but if you only use on better speakers, you will hear the difference. and i saw no 16x SATA on these two boards you mentioned. And what should I do with 2GB NICs connected via PCI-Bus??? This IS crap!
Who said ANALOG onboard sound? (anybody uses that still? all spdif here). spdif wise, unless you count jitter, there is no difference - actually, the nforce chipsets have the lead on this point. Speakers are a non issue. About the 16x SATA, I guess I shouldn't have trusted what the store I checked mentionned ("ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Dual DDR 2x PCI-E, 16x SATA RAID, 2x GB Lan"), but it still has quite a few connections. Which is always nice to have... 2 GB Nics? It is useful. We have servers with redundant NICs - and GB Nics. Why not have best of both worlds bundled? At home, you could use it to bridge your network - saving to buy a expensive GB switch for a few PCs. It can't hurt, can't be worse than a single 100BT. There's plenty of just as expensive barebone, featureless motherboards if you want, asking you to keep overpriced PCI card businesses alive.
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I too have many of my servers with GB-NICs. but only PCI-X (Hooray on my Macs *g*). Tell me how you want to use SPDIF on multi-channel-output. As far as I know, no Chipset can do realtime-encoding to DTS or Dolby-Digital.
PCI-E GB Nics aren't cheap, and we're really just starting to have boards that have the slots. The normal PCI ones I have (at home) still work very well, and it definately beats having 100BT instead. I'm all for taking expensive hardware and making it a commodity on most motherboards, like they already added USB2 and Firewire. As for the spdif output, you're wrong. You can either pass AC3 or DTS audio from such as source to it's output, or play normal stereo sources as 2.0 - even on 20$ cards. The added strenght of the nforce chipsets over the expensive PCI cards here is that in fact, it actually CAN do realtime Dolby Digital encoding @ 640kbps (I have yet to see a DVD use over 448) if you want it to. Also, don't forget spdif can pass Linear PCM, not just DD/AC3 and DTS (and then passthru the AC3/DTS when playing it instead).
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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.
The first Linux 64 bit port was probably the Alpha port, and THAT goes back quite a bit.
Guessing the superspark was the second.
There is no real need to encode to anything, I don't even know why you're onto that. Linear PCM works for normal sound, and they pass real AC3/DTS sound just fine. And all is very well supported. Never had a single glitch (unlike say, with my 350$ SB Live 5.1 Platinum, which BSOD'ed any KT133 chipset PC, had broken AC3 passthru basically until XP was out). No way I'd use analog sound, there's no need for it whatsoever. As for RAID, if you're really into a high availability scenario, then you should be using a real server. You're missing the intended market completely. And as far as the broken adapter, no motherboards available and all, that's FUD. 99%+ chances are - one of your drives will fail - not the board. And since you're into a high availability setup, you should be using a real server with hardware raid 0+5/5+0, and not even be looking at these. People buy these and throw a couple 200GB SATA drives in raid0 for cheap. Works very well for home use or non mission critical stuff, and the price is quite right too. Some motherboards hardly over 49$ have SATA RAID. There's no point of trying to save 5$ off the board and not including it when a lot of people will miss the feature. Again, there are other boards on the market without that if you don't want them, but there is definately people who use all these features, especially when it's all bundled at a decent price and good support.
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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 $$$.
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?
...and I won't use binary only drivers...
So I'm guessing you won't use binary only software either. My question is, do you read all the source code to all the programs and drivers you use? If not, you still don't know if they're hiding problems with the hardware, or have hacked routines for quick fixes to problems.
In which case your argument is moot.
And since I'm running nForce2 system, dual boot, I can tell you right now the only problem I have with linux is it doesn't seem to like my raid. And that's NOT an nVidia issue.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
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...