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AMD Hardware

Small Form Factor Dual Opteron 215

Posted by michael from the toasty dept.
Psionicist writes "IWILL has announced a new barebone, the IWILL ZMAXdp. Based on the nVIDIA nForce3 Pro 250Gb chipset, the computer offers dual Opteron support in a SFF format. "Volume production is planned in September, with a suggested price of $499. IWILL plans to get attention in workstation market. ZMAXdp will include proprietary form factor motherboard, 300W power supply, up to 2x3.5" HDD bay, and 1xAGP; PCI and SI can offer various configurations for workstation market demand." according to IWILL's homepage. I will take one, please."
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Small Form Factor Dual Opteron More

Small Form Factor Dual Opteron

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  • Heat management? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Radi-0-head ( 261712 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:06AM (#9223206)
    I'm extremely curious how they figured out how to manage the heat generated by TWO processors while leaving room in that tiny box for anything else.

    Regardless, my boxers are wet. Must have one.

    • Re:Heat management? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ruiner5000 ( 241452 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:12AM (#9223237) Homepage
      They haven't released dimensions yet. Also you can put 4 Opterons in a 1U server, so why not two in a small form factor? Remember there are also low power variant Opterons. With some good ventilation it could put the PowerMac G5 to shame, and amazingly still cost much less.

      • Re:Heat management? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

        Rack mount servers are loud and require special cooling considerations.

        The 5 1/4" drive bay, the USB ports and Firewire ports are prety good guesses at the scale.

      • Yes, you can put 4 Opterons in 1U, but 1U servers tend to be loaded with squillions of expensive and high power fans; noise isn't a major concideration when it comes to rackmount.

        I still suspect you could do pretty well with low power Opterons in a small workstation case, but don't be suggesting that a quad 1U Opteron is going to be anything but LOUD; I'd be disappointed if not -- a rackmount server should be well ventilated and have plenty of redundancy, not be quiet and running anywhere near it's thermal

    • Re:Heat management? (Score:5, Informative)

      by alienw ( 585907 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (todhsals.wneila)> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:26AM (#9223308)
      Opterons run very cool. Mine runs considerably cooler than the P3-800 it replaced.

    • Re:Heat management? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SD-VI ( 688382 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:46AM (#9223379)
      Even the regular Opteron is no Xeon; typical heat output for a regular Opteron 244 is estimated at 58W (I believe Xbit Labs did the testing), and they've got Oversized Novelty Dies to spread that over as well (something like 193 square millimeters, courtesy of x86-64 and a 1MB L2 cache).

      I suspect they're looking into low-voltage Opterons, though, which would mean even lower heat consumption. Max heat dissipation for the entire line of .13u Opteron HEs (LV) is 55W; consider that max heat dissipation for the entire line of regular .13u Opterons is, what, 89W and as I said heat dissipation under load for a normal (old-stepping, actually) 1.8GHz/x44 Opteron is 58W, and you're getting some pretty chilly-running chips. Max heat spec for the .13u Opteron EE (ULV) line is 30W, which puts it in Tualatin territory.

      So yeah, reversing the trend towards hotter chips is a very very good thing.
      • So what we are seeing here is two Opterons can equal one Prescott in power dissapation. Talking to Iwill I don't think we will see many put high priced low power Opterons in them. That would be cool, but they are really priced out of the workstation market. They are server chips all the way unless AMD makes them more affordable.

        • Re:Heat management? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Sivar ( 316343 ) <charlesnburns[&]gmail,com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @01:17AM (#9223485)
          That would be cool, but they are really priced out of the workstation market. They are server chips all the way unless AMD makes them more affordable.
          Er, the workstation market has traditionally been dominated by HP PA-RISC & Sun UltraSPARC-based systems, and other high-price hardware. The AMD Opteron 2xx series outperforms both and is several times cheaper.
          Twin Opteron 242's are around $415 USD [newegg.com] for BOTH, and that is for consumers. Even if manufacturers like Iwill didn't get bulk discounts, that isn't even a drop in the bucket for a professional workstation.

    • Re:Heat management? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MrZaius ( 321037 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:03AM (#9223868) Homepage
      Processors they can handle. These SFF producers put a ton of work into figuring out proper CPU cooling. What I'm most worried about is that they're billing it as having "two hard drive bays." (note, however, that I'm quoting the /. post, not the article, so maybe they're not.)

      I've got a Shuttle XPC with two 7200rpm western digital IDE drives and a pioneer dvd-+rw drive above it, and they're the chief trouble makers in my box. If I could just remove the middle hard drive and replace it with a fan, or even an unused floppy or flash card-reader, it would cut the number of hardware-related crashes I experience by more than half.

      In the article, Iwill says they're pushing this towards media producers. They don't settle for 7200rpm IDE drives. If they're seriously advertising this as working well with two hard drives, they'd better build some decent cooling into the drive bays, as those folk are likely to want much faster and warmer drives than mine.
      • If it's got firewire you can hang drives off the system that way. Assuming you only put a couple drives on each bus, you can still get a terabyte without cramping the drives' style. Software striping is pretty computationally cheap so it might be enough.

        For REAL media producers, you end up needing something with hardware raid and at least four drives striped. When I've built systems for digital art creation I've typically stuffed five drives in the system, four for a stripe and one for the system and appl

    • As the owner of a SFF (XPC) HTPC, I can tell you that heat will be VERY difficult to manage. I'm certain that they will use heat pipes to carry the heat from the two processors to a single radiator mounted to the top of the back wall of the case.

      As for my setup, an Athlon 2.4 with a Radeon 9600 Pro AIW and PVR250 card... well, I have to hide the thing completely behind the entertainment center to try and get the sound of howling fans down to an acceptable level.
      I'm trying to figure out how to stuff a wate

    • Heat isn't what bothers me about this set up. It's the power supply. 300 watts is NOT enough for two opterons and the rest of the system (hard drive, cdrom/dvd, peripherals) reliably. What's worse is that most power supplies are vastly overrated when it comes to real power output, and that the power generated usually scales in an inverse linear relationship with the heat of the unit. My guess is that anyone that tries to really run dual opterons on a setup like this won't have a good time with it. Crashes a

  • I don't get it. (Score:3, Funny)

    by mphase ( 644838 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:08AM (#9223215) Homepage
    I guess I can understand wanting to create something like this and even a few geeks wanting one but I really don't see the need for workstations. Maybe it's the cure for tiny cubicles though.

  • A Computer that will fit Longhorn MIN. Standards (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dozix007 ( 690662 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:08AM (#9223217)
    Well, the specifications of the Board and proccessor capabilities (which are very nice), may fit the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back. Maybe we will be able to hit their recommended standards in three or four more years.

    • Re:A Computer that will fit Longhorn MIN. Standard (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:41AM (#9223363) Journal
      Remember, Longhorn isn't going to come out for another couple of years, so most of those standards were intended to staunch shortsightedness.

      "Why would someone want to do X? It requires hundreds of gigabytes of disk space, and runs poorly on anything less than gigabit ethernet."

      By 2007, most any new system will exceed those requirements-- so if a new user wants to perform task X, they will be able to.

      • Even so, it's still insane. The fact that it will take multiple 3GHz+ cores to let you do the same tasks you can do right now with a single 1GHz core is just silly.

        It's like saying "Oh, it's not a problem that this car has an extra two tons of useless weight. After all, we can just throw in one of those huge V10's!"

        steve
    • the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back

      Assuming we're thinking of the same report, that was a report of speculation from another site as to what MS was going to recommend by way of specs for Longhorn.

      I don't recall having seen any confirmed official specs yet. It's funny how these things get accepted as fact without any substantiation...
    • Well, the specifications of the Board and proccessor capabilities (which are very nice), may fit the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back. Maybe we will be able to hit their recommended standards in three or four more years.

      1. They weren't supposed to be minimum specifications.

      2. They weren't real anyway.

  • I have a Idea! (Score:5, Funny)

    by matlantis ( 686027 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:09AM (#9223221)
    Nice now I can fit more of these motherboards in my jacket and then run like crazy out of Fry's

  • open-source freindly != Nvidia... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by James4765 ( 761196 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:15AM (#9223251)
    Hope they've got Linux/BSD drivers for it - since MS still doesn't have XP 64-bit ready, and we all know that Nvidia won't release the programming info on the (very, very proprietary) chipset.

    Guess the $499 is no memory, processors, drives, or whatnot - but it's still cheaper than the Tyan or MSI mobos. Just gotta save up the $2000 for the Opteron 250's...<grin>

    • 64 bit linux drivers have been out for the nforce 3 since last year. You can grab them here. [nvidia.com] Opteron 250's official AMD pricing is $851. [amd.com] Street pricing is near $1,000 [dealtime.com] only because availability is still low. As more vendors pick them up they will drop considerably.

    • Re:open-source freindly != Nvidia... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by klevin ( 11545 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:46AM (#9223377) Homepage Journal
      Bummer about IWill using Nvidia. I was really looking forward to the the Nvidia chipsets, "back in the day." Unfortunately, the whole "no specs for you lot" bit put a damper on that.


      Since this sort of purchase would be of the "my money, my choice" category, I think I'll go w/ one of the inevitable competitors who comes out w/ a similar design. This might work well for that home-brewed PVR I've been planning for the last two years. Now, if I could only come up with a source of income that would let me pay for it.

    • The latest versions of Linux seem to support my nForce3-based SK8N well enough.
    • There are Tyan dual opteron motherboards that run for about $200. I think the expensive Tyans that are $500+ have multiple PCI-X busses and slots (that's PCI-X, not PCI-Express) and have provision for 16GB of RAM, that would be 4 channels x 2 slots per channel x 2Gb pret slot. I doubt this SFF box will have either.

      They don't mention how many memory channels they use, a few Opteron board manufacterers offer boards with ONE channel to save wiring cost and board space. That limits bandwidth and total memo

  • Opteron's may not produce so much heat (Score:5, Informative)

    by ahmetaa ( 519568 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:20AM (#9223278)
    AMD Opteron Processor Models 146/246/846 HE series produces only 50Waats and EE series produces 35 watts. this means even dual chips may produce less heat than a Intel Presscot P4. HE and EE series will be unveiled this year.

    http://www.amdboard.com/opteron_low_power.html

  • 300W? (Score:4, Informative)

    by dubiousdave ( 618128 ) <dubiousdave@gmail.com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:28AM (#9223314) Journal
    The Opterons must use much less power than the Athlon64. I had to upgrade to a beefier power supply when I put in my Athlon64 mobo and CPU, and that's for a single CPU.

    • Re:300W? (Score:3, Informative)

      by ruiner5000 ( 241452 )
      No, they use the same amount of power unless they are the lower power version of the Opteron. A quality 300 watt power supply can certainly handle to Opterons. You see that in servers all the time. If a 200 watt in a Shuttle or Biostar Athlon 64 small form factor can handle it, then 100 more watts, which is more than an Opteron draws is more than adequate to power a 2nd CPU.
    • SFF boards usually only have one PCI slot and handle only one 5 1/4 device and two 3 1/2 devices, so already there's less changes of maxing out your power supply...at the same time they usually have quality power supplies. My Shuttle SB65G2 only has a 220w power supply but has no problem handling a P4c 2.8GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz) and a ATI AIW9800Pro.
  • First we get paint jobs, then windows, then neon and now.......Wings and fins on a computer case. Yikes.

  • dual Athlon FX (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brer_rabbit ( 195413 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:39AM (#9223358) Journal
    when are we going to see a dual Athlon FX board? Does FX even support SMP? I'd put money down if I could get today's equivalent of an Athlon MP system from two years ago.

    Athlon MP pooped out with the MP 2800, the Opteron are very server-ish, so gimme a good ole SMP Athlon FX system, thank you very much.
  • The $499 price seems too low to include the processors. Is this the barebones price, processors sold seperately?

  • Just so long as.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @01:57AM (#9223591)

    Just so long as they actually give you a set of memory slots for each chip. Some companies (Tyan) have put out quad-boards that only have memory slots for two of the chips. It'll work, and it saves a lot of real estate, but then you're completely losing one of the greatest strengths of the Opterons.

    steve-O

    • Re:Just so long as.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SnakeJG ( 719306 )
      Given the size that they are going for, it is very likely that only one of the CPU's will have memory slots. Also, if you look at the pictures for the article, it appears that this is the case, with DIMM slots only near one CPU.

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