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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?
Isn't that equal to 1 Kilowatt? First we have ONE TRILLION BYTES, and now ONE THOUSAND WATTS! One million shames on you, Slashdot.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
"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.
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.
Finally.
A pizza box that will actually cook your pizza.
nothing - after they blow the breakers. 1 kw is a lot of juice. per 1U.
So quick - convince your boss he needs one of those for his desktop, and you'll "inherit" the dual cpu you conned him into buying a few months ago so you could "inherit" his last desktop.
Oh, come on. You know your nipples got hard when you read the headline. 8 cores, 64GB of memory, onboard scsi with built in raid. Of course we can't afford it. You're not going to bed Keira Knightley either, but that doesn't mean she's "boring".
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
:D Yeah, one really has to be IT-related so as not to cough up yesterday's food when reading such comparison involving Keira Knightley and a quadX2 opteron board :D
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
For the sake of comparison, I run a 530 Watt PSU on this system, which draws about 100 Watts from the wall. Yaay for cool-running AMDs!
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.
"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.
If you actually built a rack full of 22-24 1KW 1U servers you should probably apply some forethought to how you're going to get rid of more heat than is generated by four of these:http://www.paragonweb.com/TNF1613.cfm. Also, you should probably have the power company increase the multiplier on your meter, lest it spin like an AOL CD on an angle grinder: http://homepages.newnet.co.uk/martynarnold/aol.htm
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This will allow for much better use of space in data center racks.
For example I could take out 8x 1U Intel based Dell web servers and replace it with 1 8way supermicro Opteron machine.
The Opteron server couple probably serve content faster than the 8 Intel based Dells plus with the additional 7u space I'll easily have enough space to put a saucepan on top to boil water for tea, thereby saving myself the 80p I normally spend in the data center vending machine.
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.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
"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.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
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.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
1U is exactly 1.75" high. It's an old standard for putting the holes in 19" and 24" racks, designed to allow devices of different heights to be stacked efficiently by having the screw holes laid out according to certain well-defined patterns. The patterns are quite old, and caused a lot of problems when the US tried to switch to metric (and basically failed in the computer manufacturing industry).
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 :).
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
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Supermicro Announces Quad-Opteron 1U Motherboard