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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."
Funny, I've got 20 1U and 2U supermicro opteron servers. Are you sure you researched this statement?
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.
As per TFA, they use a 1000-watt power supply. It does not consume a 1000 watts of power.
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.
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.
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.