NVIDIA nForce Professional Brings Huge I/O to Opteron

NVIDIA nForce Pro 2200 MCP and 2050 MCP

There will be two different MCPs in the nForce Professional lineup: the nForce Pro 2200 and the nForce Pro 2050. The 2200 is a full-featured MCP, and while the 2050 doesn't have all the functionalty of the 2200, they are based on the same silicon. The feature set of the NVIDIA nForce Pro 2200 MCP is just about the same as the nForce 4 SLI and is as follows:

• 1 1GHz 16x16 HyperTransport Link
• 20 PCI Express lanes configurable over 4 physical connections
• Gb ethernet w/ TCP/IP offload Engine (TOE)
• 4 SATA 3Gb/s
• 2 ATA-133 channels
• RAID and NCQ support (RAID can span SATA and PATA)
• 10 USB 2.0
• PCI 2.3

The 20 PCI Express lanes can be spread out over 4 controllers at the motherboard vendor's discretion via NVIDIA's internal crossbar connection. For instance, a board based on the 2200 could employ 1 x16 slot and 1 x4 slot, or 1 x16 and 3 x1 slots. It cannot host more than 4 physical connections or 20 total lanes. Technically, NVIDIA could support configurations like x6 which don't match PCI Express spec. This may prove interesting if vendors decide to bend the rules on anything, but likely server and workstation products will stick to the guidelines.

Maintaining SATA and PATA support is a good thing, especially with 4 SATA 3Gb/s channels, 2 PATA channels (for 4 devices), and support for RAID on both. Even better is the fact that NVIDIA's RAID solution can be applied across a mixed SATA/PATA environment. Our initial investigation of NCQ wasn't all that impressive, but hardware is always improving, and applications in the professional space are a good fit to NCQ features.

This is the layout of a typical system with the nForce 2200 MCP.

The nForce Pro 2050 MCP, the cut down version of the 2200 that will be used as an I/O add-on, supports these features:

• 1 1GHz 16x16 HyperTransport Link
• 20 PCI Express lanes configurable over 4 physical connections
• Gb ethernet w/ TCP/IP offload Engine (TOE)
• 4 SATA 3Gb/s

Again, the PCI Express controllers and lanes are configurable. Dropping this down to add those plus another GbE and 4 more SATA connections is an obvious advantage, but there is more.

As far as we can tell from this list, the only new feature introduced from nForce 4 is the TCP/IP offload Engine in the GbE. Current nForce 4 SLI chipsets are capable of all other functionality discussed in the NFPro 2200 MCP, although there may be some server level error reporting built into the core logic of the Professional series that we are not aware of. After all, those extra two million transistors had to go somewhere.

But that is definitely not all there is to the story. In fact, the best part is yet to come.