NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Tyan's Words 138
CoffeeJunked writes "There's a lot of buzz about dual-core CPUs and with the release of the nForce Professional chipset from nVidia, there's a lot of buzz about the future of SMP machines as we know them. LinuxHardware.org has just published a couple of articles that get to the heart of the new chipset and what board manufacturers will be doing with them. The first article covers the chipsets and boards, while the second article is an interview with Tyan about what to expect from them this year. It's a good read all around."
The boards look great, except... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:5, Insightful)
SATA rocks, though.
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:4, Insightful)
CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.
Depending on the task, the CPU for PATA/SATA isn't that bad.
For fileservers, on a price/capacity ratio, SATA will kick SCSI's ass to the curb and back. While SCSI is faster, and, on average, more reliable, SATA is often 'good enough'.
Or imagine a webserver with huge amounts of memory. For performance, SATA and SCSI will be roughly equal, since most files will be cached in the memory.
What about a DNS server: Again, the performance of the system should be dependent on memory, not the hard drive speeds.
Don't forget firewalls. SATA is fast enough for log files, and the CPU shouldn't be a bottleneck unless your firewall rules are extremely complex.
I wouldn't use SATA in a database server or in any other application with a lot of random disk reads/writes, but it has its uses, even in servers.
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:3, Informative)
If you buy a SATA drive you can expect the same relability as a IDE drive. An exception is WD Raptor that has a MTBF of 1.2 million hours full duty cycle, like SCSI drives.
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
if you're using an expensive, PROPER, raid card why there'd be difference in cpu usage in sata vs. pata vs. scsi?
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2, Informative)
That completely depends on the controller used. SATA unlike PATA, can easily reach or exceed specs for SCSI in terms of speeds/latency/load.
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:1)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:3, Informative)
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/maxtor-diamo
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:1, Informative)
Mod parent down down down.
It's not true in any way. SATA is not faster than SCSI in any benchmark. More convenient? How in the hell is SATA more convenient than SCSI? That's like saying your right sock is more convenient than your left sock...wtf? Then the poster goes on to mention that the "asus k8n delux nforce motherboard has 8xSATA." And that makes SATA a better choice than SCSI in what way? Oh because your "workmate just got 1" and it is and I quote "SWEET". WTF is happening
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
How about 4 spindles of [S]ATA, RAID1[0]'ed vs. a single SCSI spindle of the same size as the array for the same price?
I've not benchmarked it, but I would expect the [S]ATA to be faster AND more reliable, given WD or Seagate discs.
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:1, Informative)
The K8WE has 4 (Score:4, Informative)
Trust me.
(I have one of these boards at my desk.)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm set to dump my Promise SuperTrak for an IDE enclosure with built in mirroring that presents the disk as a single IDE mirror. I'm sick of being unable to do kernel upgrades because my vendors driver is randomly incompatible with certa
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:1)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:1)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
Re:The boards look great, except... (Score:2)
The reason there are more SATA ports is because you may want to support 4 drives but not want to require the use of your PCI-X slot because you need it for a Myrinet card or other additional add in cards. K8WE gives you a lot more options.
Talk about useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Talk about useless. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Talk about useless. (Score:5, Interesting)
To quote the article, "Just as quickly, we learned that nVidia was not happy with this "SLI hack" and they changed their drivers quickly so that "semi-SLI would not work with current and later Forceware drivers." It appears that the later Forceware drivers check the chipset ID and if the driver sees "Ultra", then SLI is not enabled. MSI decided to kill the "semi-SLI" board because it would be a nightmare supporting a board that would only run with older nVidia SLI drivers."
So, how will this be (un)supported by the opensource community? Is nvidia doing to chipsets what they did to graphic cards? Everyone remembers how they locked out rgb overlays and unified front+back buffers from the geforce4 cards, altough the chips had the funcionality built-in, the drivers would disable these features, and save them for the more expensive quadro cards (there were some quick fixes for this, for windows, mainly rivatuner and softquadro4).
Does this means that now they're going to lock-out funcionality available on the chipset to maximize profit? I can't imagine how (linux) kernel developers will support a chipset which relies on closed drivers to enable or disable a specific funcionality, and judging by nvidia's attitude in the graphic cards department (which has a point, up to a certain extent nevertheless), i can't imagine nvidia releasing the specs for opensource drivers for this chipset, therefore loosing the income from the sli model, which would become redundant.
Do we now have to taint the kernel with chipset drivers? If so, i'm out of it, this is certainly a chipset to avoid.
Re:Talk about useless. (Score:2)
Re:Talk about useless. (Score:2)
Where's the problem?
Re:You are a moron. (Score:2)
So I'm guessing you won't use binary only software either. My question is, do you read all the source code to all the programs and drivers you use? If not, you still don't know if they're hiding problems with the hardware, or have hacked routines for quick fixes to problems.
In which case your argument is moot.
And since I'm running nForce2 system, dual boot, I can tell you right now the only problem I have with linux is it doesn't seem to like my raid. And that
The New Tyan Boards using the Nvidia Chipset (Score:5, Informative)
Thunder K8SRE (S2891) [tyan.com]
Re:The New Tyan Boards using the Nvidia Chipset (Score:1)
Free Drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?
Re:Free Drivers (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to David Kirk [extremetech.com] nvidia's chief scientist whose, "sense is that developers on those platforms are quite happy with our efforts" as a justification for not going open source. Plus some totally bizarro bullshit about "hackers tak[ing] bad advantage of raw hardware interfaces."
It is telling that he did not pull out the old, tried and true "competition sensitive" bullshit that so many hardware vendors have been hiding behind since day one.
Re:Free Drivers (Score:2)
That one made a bit of sense.
Re:Free Drivers (Score:2)
How about the old "we have licensed tech in there that disallows us from opensourcing it" line.
That one made a bit of sense.
It does if they explicitly state what the "licensed" tech is that's blocking the opensourcing. If they don't then it's just BS.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
Re:Free Drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Even more bizare, nVidia contributed Gigabit patches to the forcedeth driver. Yet they not only continue to produce their own closed driver, they still refuse to release specs.
Re:Free Drivers (Score:2)
Re:Free Drivers-"Trusting" computing. (Score:1, Insightful)
it's worked so far...
I'd at least respect honesty. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Free Drivers (Score:1)
Actually it's not all that bizarro. DMA allows hardware devices to access memory without the cpu knowing about it. So a malicious user that can get a graphic card (or a nic or any other DMA device) to manipulate memory through the DMA mechanism could circumvent mechanisms like pax and other security mechanisms to some degree. And with GPU's getting more accessible to programmers that risk is increasing. Im
Re:Free Drivers (Score:1)
a) Relies on security through obscurity, so if a dedicated hacker reverse engineers a vulnerability in the nvidia proprietary driver, it will never get fixed unless the vulnerability is used in a virus or something widespread enough to get noticed by nvidia versus getting the many eyeballs effect and possibly nipping it in the bud before an exploit is ever created.
b) As you point out, applicable to, in lesser
Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:2)
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps. But I think another possibility is that the nForce3 chipset was not meant for "budget/mainstream" users, but for "enthusiasts." As we all know, enthusiasts don't want integrated graphics that share memory with the system.
The nForce4 chipset, on the other hand, does look like it's aimed at budget/mainstream users as well as enthusiasts. But with PCI Express and TurboCache [nvidia.com], NVIDIA might have a cheap solution that's better than integrated graphics.
PCI Express x16 has more bandwidth than AGP (4 GB/s upstream and downstream) and allows writes directly from the GPU to system RAM. This allows a non-integrated graphics card to share memory with the system without the huge performance hit that AGP would have caused.
Instead of integrated graphics, maybe NVIDIA is planning to "bundle" their cheap TurboCache cards with nForce4 motherboards. That seems cool to me.
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:2)
I concur. It doesn't sound cool to be but it does sound like progress.
Nvidia Taking a Stand-Over OSS Graves. (Score:1)
I feel a disturbance in the force as suddenly a thousand motherboard makers are snuffed out.*
*Jokes aside. the problem isn't with the chipset, but the attitude towards specs and other information that developers need that's being propogated. Today it's Nvidia. Next could be VIA. Then Intel after them, and so on down the line were if you want OSS to run on that hardware. It will not be on our terms, but theirs (DRM, Trusted computing).
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:3, Insightful)
Before NVIDIA entered the chipset market with nForce, I didn't seriously consider buying AMD Athlon CPUs because I thought the previous "consumer" chipsets (VIA, SiS, ALi) sucked ass. Maybe I'm being a little harsh about the pre-nForce Athlon "cheapsets." However, I felt a lot more comfortable using the relatively reliable and robust Intel chipsets, even thou
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:1, Interesting)
Then I built and AMD box with a nForce chipset.
And it rocked!
And I built another one. And another one. And another one. Some weirdnesses with the nForce chipset aside, the boxes were as stable as any of my Pentium boxes (maybe even more stable). That's including Intel chipsets in Intel boxes.
So now I'm wa
Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand (Score:1)
brains on the side (Score:2)
Re:brains on the side (Score:3, Informative)
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
Me too. I'm not moving to dual Opterons until Windows and more applications are 64 bit/multi-threaded. Overall, I've found dual CPUs to be a bit overrated but I don't use the machine as a server, just for lower level CAD as the most stressful use. Dual CPUs won't help while digitizing video (I.E., you won't be able to do something else while it happens).
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
I can state emphatically that with the most demanding graphics application I have ever used, Pro/ENGINEER (CAD/CAM), I was successfully able to run a full regression suite while building the software tools that build Pro/ENGINEER.
You will definitely be able to di
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
I've only ever used the machine with AutoCAD (overkill, really) but I might be installing PDS and Design Review.
My experience with digitizing old VHS tape of my son two years ago was that I couldn't touch anything while the process was happening. Perhaps everything wasn't configured properly and now that I think back the problem might have been with converting the avi files to another format.
Re:brains on the side (Score:2, Informative)
Of course you can, this isn't a NVidia, Intel or AMD thing, its a Linux thing. The operating system is responsible for deciding which processor to assign the work too.
Re:brains on the side (Score:4, Informative)
So, Windows can do this, even though it's only a guideline, as opposed to a true enforcement. I understand Linux has this capability, however I'm not positive.
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
Enforced affinity (Score:2)
Re:brains on the side (Score:1)
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
1> There are SMP P4 computers:
(From just one [theinquirer.net] of over 143,000 results):
"This time PC manufacturers are upset because Pentium 4 Xeons in a four way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration are thoroughly thrashed by a chip that Intel wants to consign to the microprocessor gulag."
P4 SMP has performance problems, but that's exactly why kernel support for scheduling partitions is important. Many of the results I posted are complaints about performance, but they all prove that P4 SMP exists.
2:
Re:brains on the side (Score:2)
Anandtech article was quite interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
All in one page/"print" version: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2327 [anandtech.com]
Lots of intersting possibilities. Seems to me that given a motivated/visionary motherboard maker, the only real limits are based on the form factor. Is there a super-ATX out there that would allow for say 8 PCI-e slots, 16+ hard drives, and all the rest of the goodies, all in one case?
Some will ask if there really is a need for this. Anandtech's Derek Wilson points out that having all the onboard disk controllers could add up to substantial savings-- apparantly expansion card controllers are quite pricey.
Now, if only those Opteron 8XX processors didn't cost $8XX... (or thereabouts... you get the idea!)
Re:Anandtech article was quite interesting... (Score:2)
nvidia and Linux drivers (Score:5, Informative)
nvidia SATA status [linux.yyz.us] and other Linux SATA info [linux.yyz.us].
nvidia wrote the SATA driver that's current in the Linux kernel, and has generally been helpful in addressing problems that arise in it.
Although the ethernet driver ("forcedeth") was indeed reverse-engineered, nvidia eventually lent their support behind the effort: they contributed gigabit ethernet support to the driver.
The video stuff is still closed, of course.
Re:nvidia and Linux drivers (Score:2)
We're just waiting on SCSI to finalize its "ATA passthru" drafts before the patch can go to mainline.
This says it all for upgrades on that board. (Score:3, Interesting)
Dual cores are such a major upgrade, why buy any SMP motherboard when 2 months it cant support the next generation SMP cpus...
Re:This says it all for upgrades on that board. (Score:2)
Re:This says it all for upgrades on that board. (Score:2)
Re:This says it all for upgrades on that board. (Score:2)
I see no particular reason why they couldn't add dualcore support to their BIOS - the hardware is pin-compatible, their customers are certainly going to want it, and AMD would probably help them ahead of anyone to get it right.
But, as always, buy hardware for only what it does today, and you'll never be disappointed tomorrow.
Wrong (Score:1)
The only downside is that they will always be behind in regards to clock speed compared to their single-core processors. I think somewhere in the 2.0 GHz range at initial launch.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
As a Dell laptop user... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Radeon under Linux (and I assume anywhere with an XOrg server) is a huge pain. Doesn't manually switch output displays with Fn+F8 like it should, and xv [the direct output mode, not the graphics program] only goes to the lappy panel, never to an external monitor. It might be a really trivial change in the driver source, but in the mean time it's an uneccessary frustration.
Re:As a Dell laptop user... (Score:2)
Enough throughput for HD editing? (Score:1)
My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
I've been a big fan since the pentium II days. Nary a reboot or even a hickup with these motherboards.
The only thing that concerns me is the Nvidia chip
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
Re:My Favorite MB Manufacturer (Score:1)
Very fast machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoopididoo! (Score:2)
On the other hand, These mobos are server mobos, loaded with stuff I frankly could do without, like SATA2 (IIRC, the fastest hard-drives out there are barely 50% of the way saturating a SATA1 link), Firewire, 8 memory slots and PCI-X.
What SLI croud need is a simple mobo with a simple feature set, a couple of PCIex1 slots, the two full x16's, the USB, audio, double GbE & the works as offerd by the 2200, and a couple of 939-pin sockets coming from a decent
Re:Whoopididoo! (Score:2)
Please explain. The Opteron uses Socket 940. Newer Athlon 64s use Socket 939. The Athlon 64 won't work in an MP system unless some fancy hack is performed (if at all).
What exactly are you a
Re:Whoopididoo! (Score:1)
Asus is generally the maker of boards in your target range.
Not gonna get two full x16 slots for $200 (Score:2)
Besides, if SLI gaming is your big thing, two full x16 slots is overkill, and won't affect your framerates more than 1% at best. Two x8 slots will be plenty for anything around or on the horizon.
Sounds to me like you want one of the existing nForce4 SLI boards from Gigabyte, with a drop-in dual-core Opteron to go with it. All you need,
Summary Title (Score:1)
Ummm... (Score:2)
Tyan and LinuxBIOS (Score:2)
Tyans last Dual Opteron Workstation sucked (Score:1)
I know I am running it. It has alot of problems with the AGP. Alot of games crash it. Not very compatable with RAM. (check their website to find "authorized" ram models) the drivers that were supposed to fix this made it worse. They don't even uninstall cleanly! Their BIOS is Still in beta! This motherboard was released years ago. There is no excuse for this, it's a $500 motherboard
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:2)
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:1, Troll)
xp can't do multiprocessing. [cpuplanet.com]
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:2)
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:2)
I'm don't remember seeing them state this will be a future policy, but their committment to support dual core as single CPU's for the sake of per-CPU licensing would se
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:2)
Re:As long as we are all slaves (Score:2)
They don't have a choice. Microsoft has the cushion to take the profit hit...
Re:Nop linux users are looking at 64 bit not 32 (Score:2)
Guessing the superspark was the second.