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

Re:Space heater

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because they just happen to be manufactured that way now. Remarkable leaps forward in switched mode semiconductor PSUs lately. Take a look at this baby Mini ITX PSU
Just because this device says it will deliver 1KW at peak I don't expect that was a design parameter. Most interesting is that it fits into a 1U profile, I expect this is a tiny little beast.

Problem is this: There's a growing drive here in Europe towards "green" computing. A well designed micro-cluster of nano form factor boards can beat the pants of something like this in MIPS/Watt, that's the way forward. I think CPU manufacturers are taking a wrong road into ever more power hungry devices, pretty soon energy regulation is going to tip the cart towards the "less is more" way of thinking.

Re:Space heater

[mihalis]

f it doesnt consume 1KW, why does it need a 1KW psu

My guess is the designers want to ensure excellent peak current capability. Maybe when the board switches on the transient power draw troubles lesser power supplies that nominally cover the steady state power demand. Certainly if what I've read about hi-fi amps is at all representative you are better off with plenty of headroom when trying to drive speakers with a spiky signal (that is, music), and so it seems to me a server would enjoy better reliability if the power supply was more than adequate for even worst case power draw.

Re:Historically huh?

[the melon]

The article at the Register correctly states that they have just kept there Opteron stuff hidden. Aparently hpcanswers didnt read the whole thing or do any research.

There AMD64 boards and systems can be found at http://www.supermicro.com/aplus

I personally have one of these http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n/nForce/H8DCE.cfm and it is a quality product.

I liked SuperMicro...

[(H)elix1]

I've still got some SBU and DBU mainboards still chugging away. The problem was I made the switch to AMD and SuperMicro waited years to make the transition. To bad because I liked their kit and in the PII/III era, and Asus, Abit, and SuperMicro were solid recommendations to friends and family. They sort of fell off the recommendation list because of the preference of the AMD CPU's. Now that they are working back into the workstation/server market, I'll definitely take a look the next time I do a system update.

Yes, they had a white box label that did AMD stuff. Whatever. I'm glad to see the 'pro' brand get with the program.

Re:Space heater

[Courageous]

For server solutions like these, typically the power supply is REDUNDANT. I.e., it's two of 'em, with a failover capability. This is very common, particularly in rackmounts.

C//

Is this Google's new brain?

[Dr. Spork]

A Supermicro source rushed to claim some of the glory tied to rumors that Google has become a large Opteron shop.

"There's some truth to the rumors" about Supermicro supplying gear to Google, the source said. "It was happy days around here."

This is pretty slick hardware, and given Google's recent and complete switch to AMD, this seems like a good match. Opterons are just awesome, even I'm seriously thinking of buying a 165 (slobber...).

On an unrelated note, did you notice the chipset is made by NVidia? Wow, they've come a long way! I'm impressed to see this kind of iron from a company that used to live off pimply gamers. With PCI-X supported, I can't help but wonder about what framerates one could get in a properly multithreaded game.

Re:Is this Google's new brain?

[Anonymous Coward]

On an unrelated note, did you notice the chipset is made by NVidia? Wow, they've come a long way! I'm impressed to see this kind of iron from a company that used to live off pimply gamers.

I'm impressed that supermicro is releasing a motherboard with a chipset whose main market share are game kids and who started to produce chipsets yesterday. I'm shocked thy didn't included the best option when it comes to AMD - the AMD chipsets

The reason why Intel keeps top 1 on the server market is because there's a REAL ecosystem around them, I'm writing this from a dual cpu supermicro motherboard which features a rock-solid serverworks chipset. In Intel, you can also choose IBM chipsets (they make a chipset which makes xeons beat opterons in several benchmarks with 4 cpus or so), or a intel chipset. Since AMD hasn't been relevant except for the last two or three years, the best enterprise-oriented chipset i'd choose it'd be the amd chipset (it's what HP or SUN boxes use). I guess that not losing market share is more important than quality some times - i'll be dead before using a gamer chipset for serious usage, I'd rather buy a HP machine instead of that thing.

Off topic but... Why?

[nroose]

Why does every server have it's own transformer/converter/rectifier/power supply (I think you know what I mean, that thing that converts from AC to DC)? It seems to me that it would make more sense for a room of servers to have a DC supply for all the computers.

What's more, most server rooms have a power backup unit, which converts from AC to DC and back to AC again, just so that the computers can convert it back to DC. This is terribly inefficient just in terms of electricity, and it also creates a whole lot of heat, just so that we can air condition these rooms with huge air conditioners!

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.

Standby spare

[Spazmania]

Also included: a standby spare so that when that much heat in that small a package burns itself out in six months you don't have to wait for a replacement. Supermicro is generally pretty good but packing a kilowatt of consumption into a 1U package is about as smart as running your home PC in the oven set on bake.

Maybe I'm just sore because I've spent the last few weeks identifying the bad ram in last year's opteron rackmounts from Penguin. 2 gig ECC dimms and I'm seeing a 40% failure rate from multiple manufacturers. They stacked the damn chips one on top of another. There's no where for the heat to go. Of course they're going to fail.

Re:Standby spare

[evilviper]

Supermicro is generally pretty good but packing a kilowatt of consumption into a 1U package is about as smart as running your home PC in the oven set on bake.

A kilowatt in a 1U package is generally called a "Deluxe George Foreman Grill".

If you pack the front and rear panels with several high-speed ear-piercing fans, you could disperse that kind of heat. You'll need to wear hearing protection when you go into your server room, but it's certainly possible.

Still, these are the kinds of absolutely ridiculous solutions you get when co-hosting companies all decide to charge an arm and a leg because of "size" rather than making "wattage" the most important factor.

That's a lot of HP

[symbolset]

And I don't mean Compaq.

1 horsepower ~= 746W.

The horsepower of our computers has gone from figurative to literal.

One rack of these could theoretically consume more power than this: http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/coupe/112_0107 _2000_mini_cooper_sport/

Will noone think of the salmon? http://riversideca.apogee.net/foe/fgphe.asp

Recommed PSU rating

[puhuri]

Supermicro states quite high PSU requirements. I have few 1U systems that have only 250 W systems even if the motherboard spec says minimum 350 W. However, no stablity problems even with add-on cards.

I guess they only want to play safe and do not want anyone to complain about instability because of too weak PSU.

"Consumes" 1000 watts "of power"

[Ancient_Hacker]

Hate to be pedantic, but this pizza-box doesnt "consume" 1000 watts "of power". In many ways:

• The sticker on the power supply may say "1000 watts", but that's an upper limit of what the power supply can do when maxed out. I suspect in typical setups the draw will be much lower. Opterons only draw about 80 watts, so a quad of them will only be about 300 watts. You're only going to max out with a lot of memory and many 10K RPM disks.
• The unit doesnt "consume" the power, it gets mostly (99%) gets converted into heat.
• Saying "1000 watts" is enough. No need to say "of power", the only meaning of watts is as a measure of power. I suppose we should be glad they didnt use one of the many wrong units, like watt-hours, or watts per hour.
• That's a lot of watts in a 1U height! Do they suggest mounting it high on the rack so you can use it as a hair dryer?

I do this on a smaller scale.

[linuxpyro]

I have a VIA mini-itx board that I run as a Web, mail, and MySQL server in my basement. I got the board used, with the 12 volt dc power supply. I use one of these with a small emergency lighting battery for a simple, efficient UPS. The board has a 1 GHZ processor, and draws on average about 3 amps at 12 volts. It should run for about an hour on backup; luckilly I haven't had to test that lately :).