Slashdot Mirror
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?
"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.
A Kilowatt would be 1024 Watts. So shame on you!
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
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.
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.
Kilo=1000
Yeah, right. That's what the power companies want you to believe.
"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
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.