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First Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hot-off-the-presses dept.

MojoDog writes "Today Universal Abit launched their AW9D and AW9D-MAX motherboards based on the Intel 975X chipset. There has been much anticipation in the industry for this series and as far as looks go, these boards are built to please. One interesting bullet point in the spec list is that these boards are "Quad Core Ready", in line with a possible year-end release of Intel's Quad-Core Kentsfield CPU perhaps? Time will tell!"

18 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. But! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Will that make the Mac Pro any cheaper? Or maybe a quad-core iMac a possibility?

    1. Re:But! by nxtw · · Score: 5, Informative

      no, these motherboards are for the LGA775 socket, not the LGA771 socket used by the Xeons in the Mac Pro or the Socket 479 used by the iMac/Mac notebooks/Mac mini.

      "Clovertown" may be a quad-core version of the "Woodcrest" Xeon chips used in the Mac Pro, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

      I'm not sure if Intel has any plans for quad-core mobile chips (the Core Duo used in the iMac/Mac Mini is the mobile-oriented chip, but has shown up in smaller desktop computers incl. the Macs).

    2. Re:But! by FuturePastNow · · Score: 5, Informative

      Clovertown and Kentsfield are identical except for the socket and bus speeds they use. So, yes, Clovertown is the quad core version of Woodcrest (like Kentsfield, it's actually two dual-core processors on one package) and will work fine in the Mac Pro (unless Apple does something silly and uses firmware to block upgrades).

      --
      Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
    3. Re:But! by Tycho · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Just for the heck of it I thought that I would list all of the things I could think of that would not allow one to use a quad core processor on a Mac Pro.

      First off the new Clovertown processors must use the same socket and bus protocols as the Woodcrest processors. Even if the Clovertown processors use the same socket, the new processor must have the same pinout and must be electrically compatible with the Woodcrest processors. Another potential problem is that Clovertown could require new VRM specifications.

      Finally that is all Intel can do to make the Mac Pro incompatable with the Clovertown processors. Additionally the proper microcode to support the Clovertown processor has to be in the firmware. (This may not be totally necessary as there are some x86 systems that will boot without the proper microcode for their processor. Additional software must be run to have the processor to work properly though.)

      Finally, Apple could release a firmware "upgrade" that could make it so that on boot up on detection of a Clovertown processor the computer would not boot. Apple did this with the Blue and White G3 systems before releasing the G4 towers. Even though there is a G4 tower that uses the same chipset as the B&W G3, in their default state, after the firmware upgrade the B&W G3 systems will not boot with a G4 processor in a B&W G3. However, some enterprising individual made a firmware patch of their own to bypass this G4 ROM Block. Someone else could add the proper microcode and remove any firmware block on the Clovertown, but the problem would be how to flash the new firmware. (I would imagine that Apple/Intel might make flashing a third party firmware hard to do though.)

      --
      Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
  2. Their 965-based AB9 Pro is not very good. by nxtw · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have a AB9 Pro Intel 965-based board here with a Core 2 Duo E6400, and I can't get it to boot half the time. I get an error code 8.7. on the motherboard's LCD, which means "Check CPU Core Voltage". When it does boot, I occasionally get an error or "Device Verify Failed" from the AHCI BIOS while identifying my hard drives.

    The system is impressively fast when it actually boots and works, but those two issues make the motherboard very difficult to actually use.

    1. Re:Their 965-based AB9 Pro is not very good. by binarysins · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm assuming that you've actually checked the power supply to make sure that it's putting out consistent power, considering how some brands of motherboards are notoriously sensitive to fluctuations.

    2. Re:Their 965-based AB9 Pro is not very good. by Sadiekiller · · Score: 2, Informative

      haha yea. I have a Intel-945PVS. untill i got a decent power supply, you woudl have to turn it on and off two times to get it to boot. then it tookout my Graphics card with itself one day. now i have a good PSU, but it still refuses to boot after a restart. i have to turn it off all the way, or it wont boot.

      --
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  3. Why no ECC? by 5pp000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How can a motherboard have all this stuff and leave out ECC? I would never buy a motherboard without ECC. Don't people want their machines to stay up more than a week at a time???

    --
    Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
    1. Re:Why no ECC? by Gothmolly · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Gamers don't. I don't. My workstation at work doesn't stay up for more than 9 hours or so.

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      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    2. Re:Why no ECC? by Ironsides · · Score: 5, Informative

      How can a motherboard have all this stuff and leave out ECC? I would never buy a motherboard without ECC. Don't people want their machines to stay up more than a week at a time???

      I've run multiple systems with non-ECC memmory. Uptime was originaly limited by time between brownouts/blackouts (~3 months). Then I got a UPS and uptimes have only gone up. If you need ECC to keep your system up for more than a week, you've got problems.

      --
      Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
    3. Re:Why no ECC? by ctr2sprt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Agreed, but bear in mind that a single-bit error doesn't have to crash your system (or an app). In fact, it usually won't, because the amount of "critical" memory is very small relative to the total amount of RAM installed. Instead it will silently corrupt data. This could result in a momentary glitch in what's shown on the screen; it could result in an app delivering nonsensical results; or, far worse, it could result in bad data being written to disk or an app delivering subtly wrong results. Since all modern operating systems use all memory in your box for something (cache, usually) pretty much every single-bit error is going to screw something up.

      I work with many ECC-using servers and there are typically one to five single-bit errors per month. Even though I understand the reasons for it, I am kind of bewildered that ECC isn't more common on high-end desktop systems. The RAM costs ~15% more, but gamers, for instance, are already willing to pay 50% markups (or more) for a 1% performance bump (if that). You could even market it as overclocker-friendly: the error checking will tell you when you're overclocking too high, and the error correcting will help you when you're right on the edge. It could also allow overclockers to identify DIMMs which can't keep up without the laborious process of "pull out a stick, run memtest overnight; put stick back in, pull out a different one, run memtest overnight; etc." (Or the worse one when DIMM has to be installed in pairs. Then you get the joy of testing every combination.)

    4. Re:Why no ECC? by DrDitto · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you live in high altitude areas, ECC RAM is really necessary if you want reliable computing. Even with ECC, higher-end servers will "scrub" memory by periodically reading out every memory block to correct single-bit errors before they become double-bit errors.

      The Virginia Apple Supercomputer initially used non-ECC nodes. Couldn't keep the machine up and they ended up selling off all of the original Xserve machines to get ECC Xserve's.

      At Los Alamos altitude, the problem is even worse. It isn't uncommon for non-ECC workstations to crash every other day.

    5. Re:Why no ECC? by Ironsides · · Score: 2, Informative

      Uh.. What does altitude have to do with ECC? I'm guessing you mean the Virginia Tech apple supercomputer. Altitude in blacksburg VA is maybe 1000 feet above sea level.

      --
      Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
    6. Re:Why no ECC? by VENONA · · Score: 4, Informative

      Cosmic rays can flip a bit, and have biological effects. Cosmic ray arrival rates are related to your altitude. Blacksburg VA may be only a thousand feet up, but Los Alamos is more like 8-9K--can't remember, exactly. But it's considerably higher than Santa Fe, which is about 7K.

      Also, you may not be able to accept single-bit errors, even at the lower rate you'd experience at sea level. What's good enough for a Joe Gamer's PC in Denver (5K feet) may not be remotely good enough for mission-critical servers. Wall Street is at sea level, for the purposes of this discussion. But you can bet they don't always look at random bit-flips kindly.

      As usual, how you spec a machine depends upon what you're planning to do with it. That even filters down into whatever spares you may stock for a server farm. Compare mfg. memory prices for large multi-CPU (think 8-64 CPUs, not some generic 4-way) servers running Solaris or HP-UX to memory available from the mass market vendors. Last time I did that, the mfg. memory was about 10X more expensive than something generic that would at least boot your system.

      In that environment you need to be sure that the memory you're buying really is equivalent--not just that the machine will still boot. In that case, BTW, it turned out that there was equivalent memory available, without paying a huge vendor markup. It wasn't as cheap as the rock-bottom stuff (which would still have yielded a bootable machine) but it was cheap enough to justify buying a (much cheaper) machine just to stress test it before adding it to the ready spares bin for production systems. Sometimes a four hour support contract is still too slow, but you don't want to pay six figures for a hot backup system. Which also has to be under that expensive service contract.

      If you have TB of memory to deal with, and mission-critical means minimize or eliminate flipped bits, the rules change considerably. It's a whole different world.

      God only knows what gyrations the NSA must go through. Oh, wait, they just pay vendor rates, no matter the cost. My tax dollars at work...

      --
      What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
  4. insanity by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of course some people are always going to want to have the fastest game machine on the block. But seriously, it's amazing the kind of performance you can get these days with cheap, low-end hardware. Yesterday I built a machine for $300 with a 3 GHz P4 and 1 Gb of ram. (I reused a hard disk, so that cut the price a little.) Sure I could have built a dual-core system, but I would have ended up with a machine that cost many times more, used tons of power, and had almost identical performance except when I had two cpu-intensive processes running at once (i.e., almost never).

    --
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  5. First? Not really. There's already the GA-965P-DQ6 by bmchan · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not ready to state that GA-965P-DQ6 is the "fist", but it's the first one I found out about (months ago). I've already got this MB running with a Core 2 Duo E6600, and it specifically states on the manufacturer "Ready for next generation Quad Core processor".

    http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Motherboard/P roducts_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2295

    I vote to change the name of the article "Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted" to "Another Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted".

  6. I'm still going to wait a little longer. by Captian+Obias · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm still going to wait for the eight-core boards, until then I will cherish my 486.

  7. Fashonably Late or Not Fast Enought? by Bushido+Hacks · · Score: 2

    Probably both. AMD released there press announcement on Tuesday. Intel, are you slacking off or are you not as fast as AMD?

    --
    The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.