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Quad PCIe Motherboard
SlipKid writes "PCI Express Graphics cards have allowed for some new and innovative ways to increase rendering horsepower in Desktops and Workstations. Recent introductions of NVIDIA's SLI and ATI's CrossFire technology have enabled dual PCIe Graphics cards in a
load-sharing architecture. Motherboard manufacturers are jumping into the fray now and Gigabyte has released a Quad PCI Express graphics enabled motherboard, capable of running four cards at once. The board is not capable of running Quad SLI, mostly due to lack of NVIDIA driver support currently but it does offer support for eight simultaneous display outputs on four Graphics cards."
Well, $topic pretty much says it all. More PCIe-slots, great, but it'd be nice if there were stuff besides graphics-adapters to push in.
Even if you could do Quad SLI, would it make that much of a difference in performance? At what point would splitting the rendering task be more work than it's worth?
I like the idea of an eight-head computer. I wonder what the price difference would be to equip a computer lab with octoheads instead of singles.
In fact, if I could get some long enough wires, every television in my house could be just another head of one master computer. Master Control! Huzzah!
Carpe Daemon
I like the idea of an eight-head computer. I wonder what the price difference would be to equip a computer lab with octoheads instead of singles.
Why would you do this? You risk losing eight desktops instead of just one to a single component failure (eg, a faulty motherboard).
Standard entry-level desktops and workstations are commodity items now: their prices are so low, and they are so easy to acquire that I doubt that there would be much in the way of cost savings to be had when comparing eight single-CPU PCs to one eight-headed hydra.
Don't forget, to be able to run standard applications at the same speed as even the cheapest of today's desktops the hydra solution would have to have a serious amount of processing power, memory, etc. Once you factor all those things into the equation then you'll soon realise that, in almost every case, there is little or nothing (financially, technically or even physically) to be gained from going down that road.
Of course, a home is a little different from a computer lab. For one thing, in a home solution any bottlenecks would be fewer in number and far less severe than they would be in a lab environment, which makes such a solution more viable.
Even so, I know that I for one would rather prefer a dedicated desktop, a dedicated home theatre PC, etc connected by a LAN/WAN than a single-PC, all-my-eggs-in-one-basket solution.
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Note I didn't say optimal performance or peak effenciey or any other term to make it seem like more cards would just equal "OMFG MORE FPS, YESSZZZ!". No. With games like BF2 that are starting to require specific actual components of stuff coupled with how much things like DirectX are a huge huge factor in games, you are going to need massive amounts of GPU power to get alot of stuff to run.
I mean (not to plug them or anything) but look at games like Project Offset, which plans for real-time rendering of everything no cutscenes nothing. The processing power of that game is going to be astronomical. I bet it will hit at the least a 2 PCI-E card requirement with at least 1.5 or 2 gigs of ram and 3.0+ GHZ processor, probably 3.4+. And we all remember how systematically intense past games like Farcry were, imagine cranking out a game that's five times as powerful as Farcray or even P:O you're going to require so much raw processing power it's insane.
Which itself is within the true nature of computing, technology evolves, advances, grows faster or more powerful or more advanced. I still think it's sad though, I mean you look at some of the top of the line cards these days required for games, they are insanely priced (200,300 even 400-500 or more). And yes while you can go with something slightly slower and save alot of money, as I originally said I think it will hit the point where they simply will not run without X amount of cards or equipment. Just like I can't run modern games like BF2 or HL2 on my current setup, same thing in a few years for people wanting that hot new title that needs quad cards. The price will be fucking outrageous too. You thought $400 for an Xbox 2 was bad, wait until you need to drop $300 per graphics card, two three or four times plus all the other components just to play games.
Nvidia and ATI are wetting themselves awaiting that day. Why sell them one GPU when Game X they want needs quad cards to even execute.
Aw Frell this
There did not appear to be much written in the review on the way the PCIe lanes could be configured. The default apparently has that the four physical 16-lane slots are electrically 1-lane, 16-lane, 16-lane and 1-lane respectively.
What excites me about such a board is the possibility of having simultaneously a fast SLI rendering set-up, together with fast I/O with 10Gbit ethernet and SAS. Having everything on PCIe rather than a mix of PCIe for graphics and PCI-X for I/O cards would allow more flexibility (at least, once there is a bit more range available in PCIe non-graphics cards!). Yet, if the configuration of channels only allows 1-lane on all but two of the slots, then it's not going to work out.
Um, right. If by 'NVIDIA' you mean '3DFX' and by 'recent' you mean 'ten years ago'.
Sheesh. Kids these days, they got no respect.
I would love to see a quad-Opteron mobo with four x16 PCIe slots but arranged in a way that traffic is spread across all HT links. So that I could use it to put 4 PCIe SATA cards, and have the highest possible read/write I/O throughput for a Linux software RAID array. Hardware RAID is out of the question, since no constructor offers a way to create arrays of disks across 3 or more cards. An Opteron has 3 HT links, 2 of them could be used as coherent links to other CPU's, and 1 of them could be used as a link to an external PCIe bridge chipset. The solution I would like to see implemented is one where 4 PCIe bridge chipsets would be connected to their own Opteron, via their own HT link. And each PCIe bridge chipset could provide at least one 16x slot.
Some numbers: each of the four x16 PCIe bus would allow for 2500 MT/s * 16 bits / 8 = 5000 MB/s of traffic in each direction. And each of the 4 HT links: 1600 MT/s * 16 bits / 8 = 3200 MB/s. The global amount of I/O would be 3200 MB/s * 4 = 12.8 GB/s in each direction ! (HT links are the bottleneck). To resolve this bottleneck AMD would either need to increase their width from 16x16 to 32x32 bits or need to increase the signal freq from 800 MHz to 1.25 GHz (current limit is 1 GHz for coherent links and 800 MHz for the ones facing outside worlds -- chipsets seem to lag a little bit regarding HT frequency).
But for some reason no constructor has ever designed such a board (Tyan only did it with 2 PCIe chipsets on their S2895 mobo). Why oh why is that the case ?! Seems like nobody understands the true potential of HT. This could provide a low-cost solution to so many perf issues I have seen in the various companies I have worked for... Argh !
This Motherboard will better option for them who wants to run 8 moniter at a time ...... but i don't think in day to day ususal computing this is having any importance as u u willl not be having any PCI slots. so fitting a sound card or TV tuner card will be a problem. but people doing video editing or photo editing can be really benefitted from this. and about quad SLI i will say dual GPU on single card is better option but still u will be wasting all the PCI slots. i don't think we need 4x7900GTX even we are playing with 25xx X 16xx resolution. a normal SLI of 2 card will do fine for that. so i think it will nbe useful for professionals and games sud stay away from this.
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This could be nice for a big VMware setup but, if my memory serves me right, VMware has problems with multi head setups. Assuming it works, I may need to look for a larger desk!
I don't know why, but since i'm on /. and it includes support for more displays i automaticly think of porn. Maybe it's the crowd ....
Some people say its really bad thing happening as it would raise the performance requirements of games.
BULL** it will make some EXTRA highend stuff possible. The games are designed for something thats more mainstream, and very highend systems are for extra eye candy. The game companies probably cannot convince majority of their target market to upgrade to SLI. So majority of the money is from those who don't have SLI systems.
But what does quad sli give us.
Well first use comes to my mind is 30" displays, you know the thing that has slightly over double the pixels to 20" displays. You need twice the power to run equal 3D performance on 30" compared to 20". Or 4 times the low end displays.
Another point is antialiasing requires some performance out of card.
QUAD SLI isn't cheap so it won't be mainstream, so it won't be MAIN target for game developers. However its supported.
One use for QUAD SLI is when making a game you need to design the game for performance of typical system in 4-5 years. It is probably twice or quadruple the performance of current highend think the memory bandwith of SINGLE card has quadrupled in that time frame. Also there is more than 12 times the computational performance increase.
As for free slots. There is 7 places on the case where to put a card. For game system a soundcard is a must, that gives 2 free slots with quad SLI. For gaming those two slots *COULD* get nic or some extra raid card. But neither of those are top of list items since the onboard ones could be considered good enough.
Only problem though that with 4 gfx cards dualslot cooling isn't reasonable. Some highend cards don't have dual slot cooling already, and water cooling IS option for these kind of priceye highend systems.
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Make sure that you have two seperate configuration files, and that you start X by specifying the specific one for each screen. You need at least one USB keyboard and mouse. You need to specify precisely which video card you are using, and which USB keyboard/mouse devices (versus the PS2 keyboard and mouse). You can't just use /dev/input/mice or /dev/input/keyboard, because they multiplex PS2 and USB devices (usually used in laptops).
I believe GDM can be set up to do this (one login screen per monitor/keyboard pair) but I'm not sure of the details. I imagine you'd need to make a change or two in your inittab to start it on another vt referencing the alternate GDM config (which in turn holds the custom X command line + differing config files)
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