Detailing the Chipsets
The soul of the V40z runs on four Opteron 850 (2.4GHz, 1MB L2, 130nm) processors. The daughterboard obstructs the majority of the airflow to the rear of the system, so plastic rails partition air to each bank of memory and each processor. The cooler air from the hard drive bays is pulled over the daughterboard to cool the rear processors. You'll notice that there is no active cooling on this portion of the chassis; fans directly opposite the daughterboard (slightly above the mainboard) pull cool air from the outside of the case directly over these heat sinks.
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The daughterboard connects to the mainboard via a proprietary Sun interface, but with the rails and guides holding the daughterboard, we had no problems determining if we had a clean connection between boards.
Click to enlarge.
As with any Opteron system, each processor has a dedicated bank of memory; in our case, two Samsung 1GB PC2700 modules per processor. The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory in Sun's V40z, but the newer
"E4" stepping now supports PC3200 as well. We will get more into Sun's 90nm "E4" stepping solution in just a bit. Each processor bank can utilize 8GB of memory (four DIMMs) in 64-bit operation, giving the V40z a total capacity of 32GB.
Click to enlarge.
Behind the bank of DDR DIMMs in the image above, we can also see the 12V individual voltage regulator module (VRM). With larger processor configurations, regulating clean power to each processor becomes essential, and thus, each processor has a dedicated VRM. Below, you can see one of the Opteron 850s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard.
Click to enlarge.
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dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Typo page 1: "In January, Sun sent us a V40z demonstration unit that was complete with four Opteron 250s and 8GB of PC2700."It should be "four Opteron 850's"
Also, page 3: "The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory"
This is not true, generally. I don't know about the v40z, but CG Opterons can use PC3200 no problem.
See here, for example: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q3/...
Ardan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I agree with #16. Fantastic work, Kristopher! I have a family member that works for a division of Lockheed-Martin and they are dealing with Sun more and more now and he enjoys your articles when I show them to him. He said a few weeks ago that he shows some of these articles to co-workers because of the thorough evaluations and it is helping them to decide whether or not to outfit their systems with Serial ATA drives (for Destroyers) and now with Opteron systems from Sun.Good work! ;)
tfranzese - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Excellent work Kris.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Something is wrong with the DB graphs: i am fixing it now.Kristopher
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
This server is aperantly made by Nhttp://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
OOPS, this is suppost to go where the blank post is.To the author or whom it may concern: A bad link is located on page 3 and reads:
two Samsung 1GB PC2700 – link to Samsung.jpg>
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I want Game Benchmarks too! (just for fun though)nourdmrolNMT1 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
database benchmarks arent workin here either.MIKE