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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?
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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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 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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