NVIDIA nForce Professional Brings Huge I/O to Opteron
by Derek Wilson on January 24, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The New nForce Professional
The nForce Professional marks the fifth core logic offering from NVIDIA, who dubs their motherboard chipsets MCPs (for Media and Communications Processors). Never has the MCP moniker been truer than this time around.
Like the the Quadro and GeForce line, the nForce line is supported by NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture. This means that no matter what hardware you are running, any driver will work, whether past present or future. Since NVIDIA brings its UDA to both Windows and Linux, broad corporate support will be available for nForce Pro upon launch.
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.
We've seen several good steps in the connectivity department. At the same time, performance and scalability have become more dependant on core logic as functionality moves over the PCI Express bus, more storage needs SATA connections, and more devices are plugged into USB ports, for example. NVIDIA's unique solution is the combination of single chip core logic with the ability to drop multiple MCPs (of lesser function) on a motherboard for expanded I/O capabilities.
The nForce Professional 2200 MCP
One of the big questions that we first wanted answered was whether or not nForce Pro and nForce 4 Ultra/SLI were the same silicon with different parts turned on/off. NVIDIA maintains that they are different silicon, and it is entirely possible that they are. They did, in fact, give us transistor counts for nForce 4 and nForce Pro:
nForce 4: 22 Million Transistors
nForce Pro: 24 Million Transistors
Economically, it still doesn't make sense to run two different batches of silicon when functionality is so nearly identical, especially when features could just be turned off after the fact. Pro chips don't have the same volume as desktop chips, and desktop chips don't have the same margins as pro silicon. Combining the two allows a company to produce more volume for a single IC (which lowers cost per part) that feeds both high volume and high margin SKUs. Of course, as we saw in our recent article on modding nForce Ultra to SLI, there are some issues with running all your chips from the same silicon. The fact that potential Quadro users have been buying and modding GeForce cards for years speaks to the issue as well. Of course, there's more in a Quadro than just professional performance (build quality and support/service come to mind).
But just because something doesn't make economic sense doesn't mean that we don't want to see it happen. There's just something that doesn't sit right about charging a thousand dollars more for a card that has a few features enabled. We would rather see professional parts be worth their price. Part of that equation is running separate silicon for parts with pro features. We're glad to hear that this is what NVIDIA has said they are doing here.
For now, let's get on to what we do know about the nForce Pro.
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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."