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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.
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!)
"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."
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.
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.
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