Supermicro Announces Quad-Opteron 1U Motherboard

hpcanswers writes "Supermicro, a producer of systems for the high-performance computing market, has announced a 1U-sized quad Opteron motherboard for the OEM market. The product, which is on display at CeBIT this week, supports both HyperTransport and PCI Express. It also consumes 1000 watts of power. Supermicro's announcement is all the more interesting because the company has historically only supported Intel processors."

Comments

Historically huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I've got 20 1U and 2U supermicro opteron servers. Are you sure you researched this statement?

Space heater

[iamplupp]

"It also consumes 1000 watts of power" 1000W seems a little high... Four dual core opterons doesent need half of that! Even less for single core. The article suggest using 55W opterons.

Re:Space heater

[CrayHill]

As per TFA, they use a 1000-watt power supply. It does not consume a 1000 watts of power.

Re:Space heater

[Homology]

Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable. The Opteron 870 is rated as max 95W, so four of them gives approximately 400W. A few SCSI hard disks that may use as much as 30W at startup, much memory, lots of cooling, and whatever the motherboard itself consumes, and we have easily another 100W. While a 1KW PSU seems much, it does not seem excessive.

Re:Space heater

[ivan256]

Even dual processor 1U Xeon boxes typically have dual-redundant 1000W power supplies.

You never know what an enterprise user is going to stick in the expansion slots.

Re:Space heater

[evilviper]

BAD MODS! NO COOKIE!

Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable.

No, NO, NO, NO, NO! It doesn't matter if you have a 10% effecient power supply, or a 100% effecient power supply. A 1000WATT power supply will OUTPUT 1000WATTS. The difference in effeciency is how much INPUT power it will need to do that, and how much waste heat it will produce in the process.

Power supplies are not, and have never been, rated by their INPUT. That would be just stupid, as it would seriously penalize those companies that make more energy-effecient units.

Intel's dominance at play here

[hirschma]

Supermicro has offered AMD solutions for a quite while now - just not under their "main" brand name. If you don't know that their Aplus products exist, you won't find them. Although I'm sure no one would go on record, I'd wager that Intel has pressured a heavily Intel-dependent vendor to not promote AMD's product.

In fact, go to SuperMicro's home page, and you'll notice no mention or links to their AMD based products.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. When AMD first shipped the Athlon, very few board makers dared to ship Athlon solutions for fear of Intel shorting them on chipsets. I recall, but cannot substantiate, that Asus and Abit first shipped Athlon boards under a "shadow brand", much as Supermicro is doing here.

I, for one, cannot wait to buy some of the Supermicro^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h, um, Aplus gear.

how about 16 cores?

[Ankou]

Maby you cant fit it in 1u, but Tyan makes the K8QW that supports 8 Opterons with the M4881 add on processor board. Meaning you got 16 cores of pure powa. Go ahead, compile the internet. I'd be interested in knowing if there was anything higher than that.

1000 Watt power supply, NOT 1000 Watts of power

[speedplane]

"It also consumes 1000 watts of power."
WRONG!
The board requires a 1000 Watt power supply, not neccesarily 1000 watts of power. The power supply is the upper limit of how much the board can consume. Most computers come with a 300 watt power supply even though they normally use only about 100 Watts.
That being said, this board probably consumes quite a bit of power (but much less than 1000 watts) if it needs such a heavy duty power supply.

Re:"1U?"

[Rick Genter]

If, on the other hand, you use Google to search for 1u, the very first link gives a nice, detailed explanation on exactly what 1U means.

Re:Off topic but... Why?

[Rick Genter]

It would just seem to make sense to me that the world of computing would come up with a standard for using DC, and then companies would build big power supplies that would offer redundancy, power backup, and current conditioning. It would save money, power and space.

In fact, in the telco world, this is exactly how it works. The standard is to use -48vDC. Sun (among other manufacturers) makes servers that run directly off of DC (the Netra 120 on the referenced page).

Re:Is this Google's new brain?

[ScriptedReplay]

i'll be dead before using a gamer chipset for serious usage

what you don't realise is that it's not your regular NForce4 gamer's chipset. nVidia has a separate professional line, see here to which this one (nForce pro 2200) belongs.