NVIDIA nForce Professional Brings Huge I/O to Opteron
by Derek Wilson on January 24, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Introduction
AMD is not going to offer a PCI Express based chipset for its Opteron line. They are, instead, relying on third party partners to provide core logic for motherboards.
Stepping back to look at the professional space, it seems quite odd that NVIDIA would have taken so long to provide a PCI Express based Opteron chipset in light of the fact that their flagship Quadro FX 4400 graphics card is PCI Express. This seems like the kind of graphics card that would have made sense to be paired with dual Opterons and an NVIDIA chipset. Until now, anyone who wanted more than a desktop board for PCI Express would have been forced to go with an Intel platform where NVIDIA had previously not been invited.
Of course, all that will change very soon, now that NVIDIA has launched their nForce Professional line of core logic chipsets. These single chip core logic solutions for AMD Opteron based servers and workstations will bring the professional level of support that NVIDIA offers with its professional nFroce 3 line to a PCI Express based setup.
A whole host of other features are offered as well, including an implementation of the SATA II spec, which supports the connection of SATA 3Gb/s devices, support for 10 USB 2.0 devices, and much more. Shortly, we will also be able to find both NVIDIA based Intel motherboards as well, but without the advantages of HyperTransport, it will be hard for NVIDIA to offer the kind of advantages the nForce Professional line has.
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SDA - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Thanks, Kris, but I do know that PCI-X != PCI-Express.. a lot of people use it to mean that by mistake, though, so I'm not sure what the author meant by PCI-X on the last page of the article.Also, technically, PCI-X isn't quite 64-bit PCI. 64-bit PCI is, well, 64-bit PCI; the main difference between it and PCI-X is that PCI-X also runs at a faster clock (133MHz, or 266MHz for 2.0). Obsolete PC technology is one of the few things I have any knowledge about, heh.
REMF - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
my mistake Derek, got the diagram muddled up with those hideous dual boards that connect all the memory through CPU0 and route it via HT to CPU1.mixed up memory with IO, silly me.
DerekWilson - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
nf pro supports ncq and not tcq ...I also updated the article ... MCPs are more flexible than I thought and NVIDIA has corrected me on a point --
one 2200 and 2 2050s can connect to an Opteron 150. dual and quad servers are able to connect to 4 MCPs total (2 each processor for dual and 1 each for quad).
With 8-way servers, it's possible to build even more I/O in to the system. NVIDIA says their mostly targeting 2 and 4 way, but with 8 way systems, there are topographies that essentially connect 2 4-way setups together. In these cases, 6 MCPs could be used giving even more I/O ...
#21 ---
Every Opteron has 3 HT links ... the difference between a 1xx, 2xx, and 8xx is the number of coherent HT links. In a dual core setup, either AMD could use one of the 3 HT links for core to core comm, or they could add an HT link for intra core comm.
pio!pio! - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
If I'm reading this correctly...with all those PCI Express slots and multiple MCP's and multiproc's...the number of traces in the mobo should be astronomically high..I wonder how expensive the motherboards will bejmautz - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Please correct my memory/misunderstanding...I thought the reason AMD could make a dual-core Opt so easilly was because they attached both cores via the unused HyperTrasport connector. Doesn't that mean there is no availible HyperTrasport conencters on to attch the 2050? (at least on the 22x models).
Thanks.
DerekWilson - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
#18capable of RAID 0, 1, 0+1 ... same as NF4. The overhead of RAID 5 would require a much more powerful processor (or performance would be much slower).
#15
Quad and 8-way scientific systems with 4 video cards in them doing general purpose scientific computing (or any vector fp math app) comes to mind as a very relevant app ... I could see cluster of those being very effective in crunching large data science/math/engineering problmes.
#12/#13
NUMA and memory bandwidth has nothing to do with NVIDIA's nForce 4 or nForce Pro, or even AMD's chipsets.
Each Opteron has it's own on die memory controller, and the motherboard vendor can opt to impliment a system that would allow or disallow NUMA as they see fit. What's required is a bios that: has APIC 2, no node interleaving, and can build an SRAT. Also the motherboard must allow physical memory to be attached to each processors' memory controllers. It's really a BIOS and phsyical layout issue.
The NVIDIA core logic does do a lot for being single chip. But we should remember that it doesn't need to act as a memory controller as Intel's northbridge must. The nForce has no effect on memory config.
tumbleweed - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
The Tech Report mentioned that the nForce Pro supports TCQ instead of just NCQ - is that wrong, or was that just not mentioned here?Doormat - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Perhaps I missed it, but what RAID modes is it capable of? 0/1/5? I'd love to have a board with 8 SATA-II ports and dual opteron processors and run RAID 5 as a file server (with 64b linux of course). Let the CPUs do the parity calcs (since that'd be the only thing its used for). Mmmm... 8x400GB in RAID-5.jmautz - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Thanks I see that now. When I missed it the first time I went back and looked at the summery specs on page 3 and didn't see it listed.Thanks again.
ProviaFan - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
#14 / jmautz:On page 2 of the article, there is this statement:
"NVIDIA has also informed us that they have been validating AMD's dual core solutions on nForce Professional before launch as well. NVIDIA wants its customers to know that it's looking to the future, but the statement of dual core validation just serves to create more anticipation for dual core to course through our veins in the meantime. Of course, with dual core coming down the pipe later this year, the rest of the system can't lag behind."