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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."

8 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    1. Re:Talk about useless. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. The New Tyan Boards using the Nvidia Chipset by rchatterjee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thunder K8WE (S2895)

    Thunder K8SRE (S2891)

  3. Free Drivers by gustgr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  4. 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...
  5. Anandtech article was quite interesting... by Bob-o-Matic! · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!)

  6. 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."

  7. nvidia and Linux drivers by jgarzik · · Score: 4, Informative
    As a for-what-it's-worth from a Linux driver author...

    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.

    Jeff