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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.
Finally.
A pizza box that will actually cook your pizza.
As per TFA, they use a 1000-watt power supply. It does not consume a 1000 watts of power.
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?
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.
: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.
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.
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.
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.