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More Juicy Dual-Processor Goodness 143

Posted by timothy from the dual-donuts dept.
ronmon writes: "I was cruising around bp6.com (I still want one) and happened to see a link to some pics of dual Socket A motherboards. It's in Japanese, so I can't read most of it, but this particular board caught my eye. It's a SuperMicro sporting two sockets and five DIMM slots, plus four drive connectors (IDE RAID?). Yummy!" And credulous reader Jim writes: "This one gave me a start when I woke up this morning. 2CPU.com has a screenshot of sisoft sandra scores from a Dual 1.53GHz (11.5x133)T-bird box. Apparently from an anonymous email. The scores are nothing short of amazing. Check it out." Grain of salt, remember.
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More Juicy Dual-Processor Goodness More

More Juicy Dual-Processor Goodness

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  • What the deuce? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    haha
  • And the 4 IDE connectors are almost certainly an embedded UDMA66/100 controller (like ABit puts on a number of their boards) and not IDE Raid.

  • Re:Trolls of SLASHDOT, UNITE! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    trying to get the trolls to leave? ha! we're not that gullible.

    weenie.
  • Are you sure? I don't know about that particular board, but I have an Abit KA7-100, featuring the Highpoint [highpoint-tech.com] HPT 370 [highpoint-tech.com] which does indeed do hardware RAID. So there definitely are a few chipsets out there that support it...

  • Wild Boards!

  • Wow! With one of those boards, a pair of 1.2GHz Tbirds and an NV20 board I might get decent frame rates in Unreal! Woo-hoo!
    -Rat
  • I've had good luck with the Abit boards I've been using. A PIII-500 coppermine in a Abit BE6-2 and an AMD Duron 800 in a Abit KT7. Since I haven't really bought a different kinds of motherboard in 4 years I must wonder, are people out there still configuring your motherboards with jumpers to set the clock rate? What a pain in the ass that was. I can't imagine having to go back to a motherboard where I'd have to pop off the case and play with jumpers to just change the CPU clock or bus clock speed.
  • PCI is _twice_ as fast as ISA? Really? I think it's a little faster than that...

    If you're talking PCI as it is in a typical PC config (33 MHz bus clock, 32-bit bus width), then it's at least 8x as fast (with most ISA cards using a 16-bit-wide bus, with an 8 MHz bus clock). 32x faster if you happen to be using a system with a 64-bit, 66 MHz clock PCI bus.

    Also, there are a few "real" (non-soft) PCI modems out there. Hardware modems, whether ISA or PCI, will cost more than software modems.
    _____
  • two 1.5 gighz procs are aprox 50% faster then 2 1.ghz procs... wow imagine that...
    *sigh*
    I will wait till the bugs are worked out.
    I have allready been bitten by bad dual cpu motherboards/chipset (via). Can't use the spiffy new geforce 2gts on this tyan tiger mb reliably.
    maybe I should put it on ebay...

  • Forget make clean did we?


    --

  • Uhm, news for you: PCI is much more than 2x as fast as ISA. ISA is 16-bits wide and 8.33MHz. PCI is at least 33MHz and 32-bits wide. That's rougly 8x faster. And then there's the 64-bit variant, etc...

    --Joe
    --
  • More likely, 2xATA-33 and 2xATA-100.

    --
  • CPU Integer 3656.756 MIPS CPU Floating Point 1496.255 MFLOPS The above numbers are for a T-bird 1200 133 FSB from wintune (basically dhrystone and whetstone.) The 256KB on chip cache makes a significant difference Even if you normally expect only 1.5x real-world performance on a dual system, remember these are synthetic benchmarks, and, based on my experience with other dual systems, the numbers are usually much closer to 2x than 1.5x on these types of tests. Based on all of this, I believe the numbers - they are within the range I would expect for this configuration. To echo what the orignal poster said, these things *are* truely amazing - that's the only word that seems right :-)

  • Umm... go look again, please... It's definitely labelled in the article as a TYAN motherboard. Which would be the same board that an earlier Slashdot article covered.

    Of course... further down the page, there is another picture of a similar looking dual PIII board which is the SuperMicro board.

    (It doesn't hurt to double check facts every now and then.. -_-;;)


    - Wing
    - Reap the fires of the soul.
    - Harvest the passion of life.
  • You might not have personal experience with SuperMicro dual-processor boards, but I do.

    A have a SuperMicro P6DNE dual PPro board that's been up since early 1997. It happily runs WinNT 4.0 sp6a supporting ~50 users at a factory in Connecticut. WinNT goes 3-4 months at a time without a reboot, and I believe the motherboard contributes to this.

    Some might remember that another SuperMicro dual board was used by Andy Grove to demonstrate the Pentium Pro chip on a tour sometime in 1997.

    I think their board designs are good, and I'm sure their manufacturing is as good as anyone on the market. Maybe you should reserve your judgement for products you have personal experience with?

    -jb
  • WRT the '142% improvement' benchmarks floating around, there are several issues. First, they used make clean, not make mrproper between compiles. make clean leaves some stuff lying around (and consequently speeds up the compile). Second, they used -j3 on the dual compile but not -j2 on the regular one. -j2 can speed up compiles on uniprocessor systems not insignificantly. But, even with that, I can't imagine the difference getting too far away from 100% improvement. Not that that's suprising...compiles are 'embarassingly parallel.'
  • Um perfect for a 1U case? How exactly do you fit FIVE pci cards in a 1U case? Vertically none the less.
  • I'm running mine with drives on the ATA33 and ATA66 side, not a problem, run Linux, W2k, BeOS, QNX without a hitch.

    You may have had one of the bad ones as others have pointed out to you.

    Overall I'm very satisfied with the board, but as the manual says, the board is a beta product anyways and not meant for regular users to be using.

  • Whoa there captain obvious!

    Pretty sure the fuss here is over the dual socket a -- the kt7-raid is one of many boards to have the hpt370 controller integrated.
  • ...that these boards are all legacy-free? Start chucking those isa cards now, PCI isn't available from the big boys.

  • ..bla bla man I feel like an idiot, sick today. What I meant to say was PCI will be all that's supported. Jeez.

  • I agree with what you say, but let me explain why I put that remark there: Most of the messages in this story were from people drooling over MIPS ratings and saying "I want one, too!". So I thought somebody asking a question like mine would be considered a troll (wouldn't have been the first time), and nobody would have answered. This is also the first time I posted at +2, because I wanted people to see my question and maybe answer it, even that late in the discussion.

    I think you are right in criticizing the moderation system, but the question is: how else could you do that? How do you get rid of the junk and do that fairly?
  • Athlon boards will require as many as 8 layers to fit into an ATX form factor. IIRC, the industry standard is 4 or 6, so this would be a new (and likely expensive) manufacturing process that may require new tooling to produce in bulk.

    The Asus A7M266 (Socket A, 761 northbridge, 686B southbridge, working PC2100 DDR support) is an 8-layer board. It's available now, though in short supply. Lowest price on Pricewatch is $185.

    Dual-CPU boards always cost more than equivalent single-boards, but the delta doesn't have to be huge. If we assume that the good 761 boards will use 8 layers anyway, then the incremental variable cost of MP is whatever extra AMD charges for the 762 versus the 761, plus the extra CPU socket.

    I predict that the first dual Socket A board (Tyan's?) will be ridiculously overpriced ($499?) due to lack of competition and will be aimed straight at the less price-conscious server market. But once competition kicks in, we should see several 760MP boards in the $200 range.
  • Could somebody well-versed in Japanese please put up some kind of translation, into something that the fish can handle (i.e. french, german, english) so us mere mortals can look at this stuff too? Lotsa ppl would appreciate it...
  • Good to see someone with a brain for hardware. As far as I've heard, Tyan will be the only one with dual AMD boards for a while.
  • How about a link to a review of the Abit VP6?

  • I certainly HOPE it's intended to be humorous. :) If not someone is seriously misinformed.

  • PCI is newer than ISA and twice as fast. PCI involves a 33 MHz bus, as opposed to ISA's 16 MHz bus. ISA modems cost more because they tend to handle the actual signal processing on the modem card. That is the only case where I can think of an ISA card costing more than a PCI card.

    There are no ISA slots on many newer motherboards (including my Asus A7V) because ISA is over ten years old. Even the newer PCI is scheduled for an overhaul in the form of PCI-X, due out this year.

  • As I recall Itanium is 64 bit, has yet to see commercial release, and has a hard enough time running as a single processor. Athlon/Thunderbird is 32 bit, is over twenty months in widespread commercial release, and competes against P-III/P-4, not Itanium.

    From what I have seen, running standard 32 bit software the Itanium should not be compared to any current 32 bit chip -- it gets beaten into the ground by anything faster than a 486.

    On the other hand an Itanium running native 64 bit code should outperform any current 32 bit chip in FP operations, which makes it ideally suited for FP-intensive tasks where the Pentium III/4/Thunderbird cores will never dare tread ...

    In terms of performance, in terms of architecture, in terms of intended market, comparing an Athlon to an Itanium is silly.

  • What you say makes sense assuming the software running on the processors is capable of harnessing that feature.

    What I still do not understand is how these two processors could function at greater than two times combined individual performance if the bus linking them is a fraction of their core speed?

    What I am wondering is if the techniques with which you are familiar also apply to x86 architecture. It is usual to see something more like a 1.5:1 improvement overall in Pentium-based MP machines. From what I have seen of benchmarks that's the norm.

    The Athlon IS a different architecture, and EV6 IS a different bus. I suspect that if putting two Athlons together MORE than doubles their speed that will make considerable waves in x86 computing.

    On the other hand as has been pointed out elsewhere the posted Sandra scores are based on a motherboard with virtually no features that would allow an overclock from 1.2 GHz to 1.53 GHz. In addition these types of unsubstantiated "announcements" are the norm on many smaller tech sites looking to boost their readership.

    If you could answer my questions or point me towards resources where I could do a little research it would be appreciated. Thanks for your comment.

    -JoeGee

  • True, I was just going by bus speed in MHz.

    You're right -- my bad.

  • That's true. The "fair" test results would have been interesting to see. I did not notice the -j3 compile flag, just gave the results a cursory glance and thought "yah, right ..."

    I still cannot understand a > 2 times increase in speed as aminorex asserts, but I'll take him on his word. I assume with different bus architecture such a thing might be possible, and there IS a whole world out there above and beyond x86.

    I have a hard enough time keeping my facts straight with x86 without worrying about Compaq, Sun, HP/IA 64, and IBM.

  • Intel SMP systems gain 70% for the second processor in these sort of tests (this was taken directly from the discussion at Aces's Hardware when the linux compile results came in). EV6 is a much better SMP plaform than Intel's shared bus system so it should score higher than Intel's 70%, in fact in the same conversation we decided that 90% would probably be close to correct for these boards (due to such things as DDR Sdram, large caches, etc)...

    Now real world tests (aka executing actual apps) will probably only gain 60-70% (against 50% for an intel machien real world result). I've seen a couple dual alpha boxen & they seemed to get results similiar to this (can't bench with sisandra of course though, so I could see synthetic benches on it even if I was allowed to run them)...
  • I was at a career fair Friday looking at Solectron's booth. They had a board they made for Cisco, about 50% larger area than an ATX motherboard. I asked him how many layers it had, and he said '16'. I was a little aghast, but I picked it up and looked, and he was right. Also had column array packages with *thousands* of pins each. So this making, say, an 8 layer Athlon board isn't unreasonable.
  • Dear articulate coward:

    I was not on the wrong article. Had you been able to fully read the article, you would have noticed the image referred to (in the slashdot article) at:

    http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/article/2 00 10124/17.jpg

    Although I was wrong about which slot was in backwards: the first 5 PCI slots are keyed in the wrong direction.

    You should check your information before considering yourself so much better than everyone else.

  • Note the key on the PCI slot closest to the edge: the card would have to face backwards. The Tyan board also had 64bit PCI slots -- those look like 32bit connectors -- not server class hardware.

    The board looks less densly populated than the Tyan. Either it's a cleaner design -- or maybe this is just a mock-up (so it's okay the slot's welded on backwards).

  • Actually, the RAID included in the Abit boards and almost all other IDE RAID boards are BIOS-based solutions..
    they are still softare, just at a lower level (BIOS vs. Driver) but as far as true hardware raid, only one company makes a microcontroller-based IDE RAID card, which, at the price of high end adaptec raid cards, isnt too lovely an idea...
  • mod this funny Jane Fonda loving bastard up!!!
  • I have both a P6DGE and a P6SBA, and both of them have worked wonderfully for me. Supermicro does still support older boards if you check into it. They modified both of my boards so they could take coppermine chips, so now I'm running dual 800's with the same board that's 3 years old. I've used just about every motherboard maker out there, and supermicro has always been my favorite. Besides, I kinda like my boards being 6 layers instead of 3 or 4
  • Almost nothing worth buying is ISA anymore (I'll ignore sound cards and modems in that statement). Servers don't need those. And a server can get an external modem if need be.

    PCI is much faster, especially when you get into 64 bit and 66MHz PCI busses.

    ISA is a leftover technology now, with slots there for backwards compatability. Similar to what Apple did with getting rid of the floppy drive (except it's easier to attach a USB -> floppy converter than an PCI -> ISA device if such a beast even exists). For a server motherboard in 2001, I can't see why you'd want an ISA slot. I'd rather get an extra PCI space and toss the ISA stuff.
  • Yeah. I ran "Sisoft Sandra" on that dual Intel P4 @2GHZ, but I haven't yet taken the time to anonymously e-mail the screenshot to 2cpu.com .

    Also, I developed a version of lnxoskrn.exe that will successfully run in place of ntoskrnl.exe for either NT 4 or 2000. Unfortunately, I work on that alone 50 feet below the earth in an abandoned Atlas Missile Silho.

    Oh, also I scraped the cure for cancer off a rusted "tin" container of Juicy Juice.
  • That benchmark looks too good to me. I'm not sure I buy it. The Athlon 1GHz gets 2792 for its ALU. The dual T-Bird 1.53GHz processors get 8576. 2792 * 1.53 * 2 = 8543.52. Now the 1GHz I believe is an original Athlon and not a T-Bird. Also the 1.53 GHz processors are running at a 133 Mhz DDR FSB while the 1GHz is running at 100 Mhz DDR FSB. Between the increase in FSB and Athlon vs. T-Bird I would think that might by it an extra 10% performance at equivalent clock speeds. 2792 * 1.1 * 1.53 * 2 = 9397.872. 9397.872 * .75 = 7048.404.

    However, there is always overhead when running multiprocessor systems even with good multiprocessor archetectures like the EV6. Generally I expect to get 1.5 the performance with two processors compared to one. Anything much above the 7048 above doesn't sound right to me.

    Anyone have any explanations?
  • SMP might not be the greatest gift to man ever, but you still can't beat the price/performance that SMP systems give over seperate machines, not to mention the complexity of clustering machines together.

    I think Grace Hopper's analogy still applies: when one horse isn't strong enough to pull a cart, you don't try breeding a bigger horse, you just add another horse. Intel and AMD have created the ugly situation were their companies must revolve around creating faster and faster processors (stockholders love that) when they should really put more effort in making it more efficient for multiple processors to work together. The crap of the matter is, that when that happens (think: Xeon) the price of the chip is so high that it's cheaper to buy the commodity version and then run multiple machines.

    Someone will get it right, sooner or later. Until then, the consumer just gets stuck with the bill.

  • The original rebuttal quoted 3Dfx. It kinda slipped off track of main processors, but the argument still stands.
    • But it is most certainly a lot more expensive to scale it up. The vendors may sell 2-way and 4-way SMP motherboards for not overly princely sums, but moving on to higher multiples guarantees pretty monstrous prices, because you're simultaneously mandating:
      • Small production runs, compared to the teeming hordes of single CPU motherboards, and

    Didn't you just contradict yourself there? If there are "teeming hordes" of single-processor boards, why build another one to compete in an already saturated market?

    IMHO, the reason why multi-processor boards are expensive is because they target corporate consumers. You see this all the time in the prices with, for example, rackmount vs. desktop computers and the like.

  • Tried what? Making a card that ran with two or more processors? The Nvidia Geforce cards seem to do it pretty well.
  • imageine a beowulf cluster of these :)
  • If you look at the Dual T-bird Whetstone score, it is 85% higher than the Dual PIII score. The ratio of the bars, however, looks to be roughly 3:2.

    The Dhrystone score is 58% higher vs. the PII, which is not such an amazing feat considering the clockspeed is 53% higher. --M

  • There is nothing strange about a factor of >2 speed-up in a 2-way run of the same job. Working on MPPs most of my life, I'm very familiar with the effect, which is due to the fact that the 2 cpu system has twice as much cache, and hence significantly less bus traffic occurs overall. The cpus don't stall as much waiting for memory to load.
  • >Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am
    >certain. But this is as ridiculous as the
    >recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel
    >compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater
    >than two times increase in speed between one
    >processor and two ... Yup.

    That is common. notice he used -j3. This causes 3 files to compile at once, not 2. This helps because one compiler may be waiting on i/o, but there is still 2 compiles to use the cpus. If the test was done with -j2, then it would have been "fair".
  • That's funny resourse utilisation doesn't go up when you use them, plus HDDs about double their benchmarks Mind you SCSI's the go in this regard, especially the more upmarket cards's which have a SDRAM slot or 2 on the card, that make fantastic caches or RAMdrive swapfiles.
  • That Supermicro board in a VIA dual Socket 370 board.

    After Supermicro only supports Intel CPUs
  • it can be put at the bottom (like on the Epox, Iwill & Abit boards) sharing a backing plate slot with a PCI slot, thereby adding flexibility without any sacrifice such as losing a PCI slot.

    Its much better than having a stupid useless upsidedown AMR slot there, or sorse giving up a PCI slot for a conventional AMR slot.

    Besides jumpered ISA modems leave PCI modems for dead.
  • by sacrificing the bottom ISA slot, you just lose flexibility, as they are shared.
  • Ok, so that thing can do 4.96 gigaflops with two processors. Funny, since a single G4 can do that now. :)

    ---

  • Anybody know what kind of memory these will be using?

    If I can eventually buy one of these boards with a $70 dollar 256 meg stick of RAM from pricewatch [pricewatch.com] Then it would be pointless to do any upgrades on any of my computers. I just wish I could quit drooling over this! Look Out Intel!
  • Well, not a big deal or anything, but the actual introduction of ISA (as far as the PC goes) would have been with the first IBM PC, which my copy of "The PC Programmer's Handbook" by Sanchez and Canton (this book rules, BTW) says the first IBM PC was released August 12, 1981.

    Since we're rhyming off pointless facts :) here's a few about that machine:

    - 64k RAM
    - 40k ROM BIOS + BASIC
    - (TLA time) 1 SS, DD MFM 40 tpi 160k FH 5 1/4" FDD. MFM made it totally incompatible with GCR C64 floppies meaning one had to build an adapter...
    - DOS 1.0 included (duh)
    - 8088 processor (the 8086 PS/2 25 & 30 came later)
    - 5 slots
    - 1" card clearance (later shaved down to today's 0.8" for 8 slots)
    - 63.5 Watt linear P/S (or maybe it was switching after all... one tends to forget)
    - Choice of MDA or CGA video
    - No HDD
    - 83 key keyboard (the IBM M boards don't even begin to compare to this IIRC ALL-steel tank).
    - EXTRA LOUD PC beeper

    Now, wait a minute why do I care and where were we, oh yeah:

    That makes ISA almost 20 years old! ISA is dead! Long live ISA!
  • And what does this looks like?

    * Dual Athlons
    * 2 Ethernets (look near the parallel port)
    * 2 SCSI connectors (in the extreme left side, the picture quality sucks)
    * 4 64-bit PCI slots

    So what does this looks to you? a typical workstation?
  • Remeber, that's four interrupt lines PER SLOT. Each slot can have its own set of 4--in non-IA32-land, at least.

    You get for interrupt pins per slot, but they can map all into the same IRQ. Or more likely you have about 6 PCI slots and 5 IRQs total, and IRQ assignments roll (so Pin A on slot 1 is the same as Pin B on slot 2). There isn't a hardware problem with shared IRQs on a PCI bus, so as long as the drivers are happy, it is only a small loss of performance.

    And where did this all come from anyway?

  • expect L3 to start showing up soon on IA32

    Or maybe years ago....The AMD K6-III (that was years ago, wasn't it?) had a L1 and L2 cache. It went into existing K6 motherbords that had an existing L2 cache, and it worked with the existing cache, making that an L3 cache.

    Not that it was all that popular.

  • This really is what's going on, and everyone is doing it. Memory speeds are advancing much more slowly than CPU speeds. To fight this, we see more or faster cache, more levels of cache (expect L3 to start showing up soon on IA32) cleverer cache controllers and cleverer compilers. Real benchmarks (see for instance http://www.specbench.org) show improvements from memory OR CPU speed-ups, so neither is totally bottle-necking the other at this stage.
  • you forgot to time the operation :)
  • You'd probably do better with -j4, since even -j2 will speedup a single processor compile.
  • Thanks! Good point. The KT series are often advertised as having ECC, but, looking at VIA's spec sheets, the KX actually has it.
  • A lot of 133Mhz motherboards based on VIA claim to "support ECC"... but don't actually do any error checking or correction. I'm not sure where this came from; the VIA specs don't list ECC as a feature, but the ABit VP6 specs *say* the board supports ECC. It doesn't.

    So, if you want a nice, stable system, be very wary.
  • Sure, but for a tinkerer, it's a pain to have to go and buy a new PCI card when you just want to plug that ISA card in for a minute...

    I've got IDE now, but I wanted to grab data off of an old SCSI drive (old - 5.25, full height) that I had kicking around. I had to go set up my old 486 because I don't have a PCI SCSI card, just an ISA and a VLB one. That ISA SCSI card is nowhere near fast, but considering the drive and the short-term nature of the task, it would have been good enough.

    I also wanted to test an old sound card, an Awe 64, that I was giving to someone. I couldn't plug it in. Major pain. If I wanted to bring one of the old A/D boards home from work and fiddle with remote sensors, I couldn't because they're all ISA.

    If I could replace any ISA card with a PCI card, at midnight, without leaving the house, within five minutes, that'd be okay. But if I can't, it's not so handy.

  • Re:Ah... (Score:2)

    by tbo ( 35008 )
    This implies to me that if you want a dual-processor laptop, you'll have to have two CPU's with less power (each) than a single-CPU laptop.

    Transmeta's chips (and the G4) both use much less power than Intel/AMD offerings. The G4 is also smaller (don't know about Crusoe). That's why I think AMD would need some new technology to pull it off. There's also all the cool shit IBM has (0.01 micron process in the lab, SOI, etc.).

    Apple has demonstrated the possibilities of G4 laptops (with no fans, I believe), so a dual G4 or Crusoe laptop should be possible with clever engineering. Phase change heat pipes might be useful, for instance...

  • Ah... (Score:2)

    by tbo ( 35008 )
    ...but can you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these? [Ducks for cover]

    Those are very cool (figuratively), but I bet they put out tons of heat. Someone mentioned that the board appeared designed to fit in a 1U case. What would it take to properly cool it in such a small enclosure?

    What would be even cooler is if AMD bought Transmeta and made dual-CPU laptops (or at least chips suitable for use in said laptops). Then there might be something out there cooler than Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4. Multiprocessor laptops... Drool.... For those occasions when you need to perform advanced simulations of nuclear weapons tests while on that long redeye flight. (Can anyone else actually think of a good use for that much power?)
  • I can't think of anything ISA that you couldn't replace with a cheap PCI solution.

    Rader

  • Good points. But as you said, "for a tinkerer" you wanted ISA. Then buy a motherboard with ISA. There are lots of different types of computer users out there, and some of them have multiple computers lying around, and some of them do wish for a non-ISA motherboard.

    So I'm sure that as long as there's a market for putting an ISA slot in, some MFG's will continue to do so.

    As long as there are options to buy boards with ISA slots on them, *I* want the option to buy boards with PCI only on them. Well, I guess this really isn't an argument until the MFG's take our choices away from us........see you then! :)

    Rader

  • Please excuse my ignorance, I haven't followed hardware developments very closely for some time.
    So those Thunderbirds have a multiplication factor of 11.5 over the system clock? And over the RAM, if it's SDRAM133 (or whatever that is called). Even with DDR that still makes a factor of about 6, which imho is downright ridiculous. How well do these things score in real applications, not just cycle counting in first level cache (aka MIPS and MFLOPS)? I can't imagine you get much over a 800 MHz system ... could somebody enlighten me what news there are other than the raw clock speed? (and no, I'm not trolling, I really want to know. otherwise I would have checked 'post anonymously' ...)
  • This SUCKS
    There are many ISA cards that cannot be found in PCI form. The RealWeasel [realweasel.com] is one of them. Many aquisition cards and even do-it-yourself ISA boards (as the ISA signaling/integration is MUCH SIMPLER than the PCI way)
    We DEMAND an PCI2ISA converter with an external ISA card cage. (alltrough i'm not sure it will work as the ISA bus has access to all irq's and the PCI slots only to the four INTs assigned to them.)
    --
  • I mean the nVidia GeForce cards don't have multiple graphics chips...

    -----------------------

  • Not main processors, what are you talking about?

    -----------------------

  • Which is an MSI-694D Pro-A. You can take a look at one here [msicomputer.com]. There is also a RAID version, otherwise identical, here [msicomputer.com].

    The only difference I can see is that mine has 4 DIMM slots as opposed to 5. I can't tell from the picture in this article whether it's a socket for PIII or Athlon though. Considering it's got a VIA chipset that looks just like mine, I'd say this motherboard is just a dual PIII board.

    However, it totally rocks. :) To sum up a few of its features:

    • Dual IDE buses (yes, it does have 4 IDE ports), one at ATA 66, one at ATA 100.
    • Firewire and USB onboard
    • Nice clocking facilities
    As well as the usual neat bits, and onboard sound. Recommended if you need a PIII board, specially dual processor.

    Fross

  • I'd have to agree. You can clearly see that the two dimm slots nearest to the processors are different than the other three. The two closest to the processor appear to be used for DDR SDRAM, due to the single notch, whereas the other three appear to be for standard SDRAM, due to the two notches.
  • IIRC, the industry standard is 4 or 6, so this would be a new (and likely expensive) manufacturing process that may require new tooling to produce in bulk.

    Not likley, I dont know about the pc motherboard market specifically but in other fields of electronics manufacturing it isn't terribly uncommon to have 6, 8, or more layers to a pcb. It may be a little more tricky for somthing the size of a full ATX mobo but it's not uncommon. It shouldn't be teribly expensive in production quantities either (~$20 per board in ten-thousand quantities at a guess).

  • Ok, I would like to say that no one thought of using the babel fish japanese to english translator. That site was not entirely about a dual socket A motherboard. The supermicro board you saw was the 370ddi board, a new dual p3/celeron board that has 5 SDRAM slots, not DIMM slots. The actual dual socket A part was very small and only mentioned the Tyan board. Please translate before you go posting something like this, because it just creates a lot of hype for things that are false.
  • When I worked for Corel (in Ireland on Linux Support, not Canada on code, remember that let's you know the sort of people I could get too and hence how much the following is about personal opinions rather thatn corporate policy, it's just what I think), I tried (in the limited ways that I could) to get them to do just this! I suggested that if they can give away free to use WP8 than surely they can dig back somewhere and give away a Free version (say the first draw+wp versions released for unix). Alas, while a few people thought perhaps, they generally couldn't grasp any benefits to them. As for GPL or even Open Source WP9/10 ... I don't think they had the stomach for that AND I don't think they thought anyone else would have a clue how to work with the code ... I'm not even sure if they knew if they could work with the code. When I heard talk of a re-write of some of the programs I always suggested it again (if anyone who might be worth saying it to and I knew wasn't against the idea was around) because it could offer someone like them the opportunity to ditch being toolkit writers and let them focus on the important stuff.
  • IDE RAID on the MOBO has already been done.

    Check it out here: Abit KT7A-RAID [abit-usa.com]. It's got the on-board IDE RAID you dreamed of, AND it's been acclaimed [anandtech.com] on Anandtech [anandtech.com]... their mobo pick [anandtech.com] for many of their high-end systems. Ultra ATA-100, 3 DIMMs, 1 AGP, 6 PCI and you even get to keep your one ISA card :)

    Sadly, no dual processor support yet :(
  • You better buy from someone who can provide support and not some fly-by-night online store. I worked at an authorized Supermicro dealer and we had to have an account setup to talk directly to support. I built dozens of systems with that board and never had problems with Adaptec controllers. I have to admit that I haven't tried USB because we were way beyond that board by the time Win98 came out of beta (if it actually has yet).

    I used to talk directly to the head of the tech support and he was also in charge of overseeing development. We had some customers want some really particular bios settings and tech support said they would burn us custom bios if we really needed it. Have you actually tried updating the bios? I built a Lightwave animation box with a P6DBU and a 3d Labs Oxygen RPM video card. There was a conflict with the bios. I jumped on their site and found the updated bios right away. Their tech site is good with updated bios, pdf manuals, etc.

  • Actually all those Abit boards (& Epox & IWill, etc) that have an extra IDE controller, so that they support 2x4 IDE drives (instead of the normal 2x2 IDE drives) suport RAID (0,1 & 0+1) on the extra 2 IDE connectors.

    Abit & Epox used a Highpoint controller, IWill uses an AMI controller, while Asus uses Promise (which on some Asus boards has to be bios hacked for RAID). All 3 brands of controller have their good & bad points.
  • Looks like it has 5 x 64bit PCI slots, and the four DIMM sockets are slanted, perfect for a 1U case.
  • 2cpu.com [2cpu.com] seems to have some small site maitenance issues, but there is still alot of stuff there.

    What I am interested in is some info on some older multi processor boards, just so that I can get the last bit of milage from some older cpus I have kicking around.

    But then I remember advice I used to give some retail customers, half in jest:

    Remember, if you can buy it here at (mass market store), technically it is obsolete already.

    But then, some people love living on the trailing edge [trailingedge.com] of technology.

  • I presently have 5 PCs, 4 of which were, when new, the biggest heat generators available. (Yup, it includes fast Athlons and an Alpha). It's -20 (centigrade, that's -5F) outside today, yet _none_ of my radiators are on! I heat my flat with PCs!

    FatPhil
    -- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
  • Take a closer look. The first two slots closest to the processor are slightly larger. The keying notches are also in different places. Most likely DDR slots, but the board still has SDRAM slots for those who don't want DDR; now that's a nice feature.

    Now, all of this stuff is well and good (dualie Athlons), but AMD needs server-class boards. That means things like built in SCSI, 64 bit PCI, etc. AMD has wanted the server market since they originally introduced the Athlon (and everyone wanted it since then) so it should be here soon.


  • ..not faster cpu's that hide the flaws. Case in point "Wordperfect 5 (or 4.2)".
    --
  • There this [impress.co.jp] 760MP based board from Tyan shown in the article. Only four DIMM's though...
  • All these boards look fine to me. But what is more apperent now is that SMP is truly a dead end when it comes to multi processor systems. Intel has bled it to the last drop and others such has Sun and IBM have taken SMP to new bounds that are still not matched in the PC industry.

    But, right now we are heading in the direction of massively parallel comuputing done using non SMP meothods. Good clustering practices has made SMP nearly obsolete. Mix that with the non ability for non intel vendors to come up with a motherboards for non-intel CPU's on the PC market, I feel that the end of SMP has been well written in concreate and hardended.

    Mix that with good software such as Mosix which lets you parallel process any software without specfically having to compile the software into a traditonal beowulf type messging system (PVM/MPI), we are now on the verge of having home grown Cray system in every basement.

    Enjoy

  • It's really too bad that supermicro boards suck (Score:3)

    by alhaz ( 11039 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:36PM (#457301) Homepage
    I know there's a lot of hype behind supermicro, I know they have really cool feature lists.

    But I know too many people who have paid a premium to own a supermicro product only to find that they were slightly flaky, that the super nifty features didn't work properly, and that the boards were quickly orphaned (support discontinued) when newer boards were released.

    I won't buy 'em, and don't recommend 'em.

  • AMDZones take on the "Tyan" board: (Score:3)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @10:20PM (#457302) Homepage
    I found this over at amdzone [amdzone.com] I agree:

    2CPU has what they are calling Dual 1.53GHz Athlon scores on a Tyan board. Well, there are a couple of problems with that which make me very, very unsure that these are legit. First of the Tyan 760MP board does not have overclocking features. I know, I held one in my hands at Comdex. So you think that they might add clock multiplier features in the meantime? Nope, what they had was the final revision of the board which only needs a final chipset from AMD to be complete. Second, it is very difficult to get a 1.2GHz Athlon to even 1.4GHz, much less 1.53GHz, and then you are telling me they got two to go that high? Lastly there are no details about this system at all except that it is using the Tyan board. Who knows, maybe it could be right, and I'm not saying 2CPU is making it up, but there are not enough details and not enough evidence, and there is too much logic keeping me from believing it. And for the fools that will say that I am jealous because I don't have dual scores to post here, don't even bother e-mailing me. That is ridiculous.

    Pretty much says it all regarding the benchmarks we "saw".

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:30PM (#457303)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Sorry, no IDE RAID (Score:3)

    by zaius ( 147422 ) <jeff@zai u s . d y ndns.org> on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:17PM (#457304)
    Nope. The four sockets consist of two normal ATA-33 IDE channels, and then another two ATA-66 with a seperate on-board controller... I suppose you could do IDE software RAID if you wanted but it's not HW RAID...

  • slashdoted (Score:3)

    by slashdoter ( 151641 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:16PM (#457305) Homepage
    it looks like it's slashdotted, so here is a part of the story

    ....so after that, we timed the compile time for the latest kernel version at 2.1 Sec...


    ________

  • Alternatively... (Score:4)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Sunday February 04, 2001 @08:39PM (#457306) Homepage
    What's easier?
    • Installing the latest RPM or DEB packages, doing a bit of config work via rsh, and being able to scale to 64 way by putting 64 boxes in the rackmount unit, or
    • Designing a motherboard that integrates together 64 CPUs?
    SMP certainly provides the benefit of very fast communication between CPUs, so if processing is strongly dependent on that, SMP wins.

    But it is most certainly a lot more expensive to scale it up. The vendors may sell 2-way and 4-way SMP motherboards for not overly princely sums, but moving on to higher multiples guarantees pretty monstrous prices, because you're simultaneously mandating:

    • Small production runs, compared to the teeming hordes of single CPU motherboards, and
    • Sitting at the bleeding edge, because nobody wants a souped up version of a CPU that was "state of the art," LAST YEAR.
    Kernel compiles aren't liable to benefit all that much from parallelism, moving forward; consider that with a Pentium III or Athlon, it doesn't take long to recompile Linux even from scratch. It's just getting to be less and less an issue.

    As for benefiting from other forms of parallelism, it is entirely likely that the toolsets surrounding Beowulf and PVM will improve over time to make it easier to manage doing "clustered tasks" in much the same way that we have progressed from having rather primitive "package management" tools to having stuff like AutoRPM, apt-get , and BSD Ports.

  • SuperMicro board is Socket 370, not Socket A (Score:4)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:12PM (#457307)
    The 5 DIMM slots are almost certainly a combination of 2/3 with 2 being one type, and 3 of another (between SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM).

  • Re:End of SMP (Score:4)

    by EvilJohn ( 17821 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @07:44PM (#457308) Homepage
    But what is more apperent now is that SMP is truly a dead end when it comes to multi processor systems.

    I disagree. Clustering does NOT solve the issues solved by SMP. Many applications simply do not function that well clustered (i.e. databases). Intel simply removed SMP from the P4 chip due to cost, not due to the lack effectiveness of SMP.

    If Intel had given up on it, why is a major focus of the Itanium multiprocessor operations? The flaws of P3 in reference to the poor scalability beyond four (or even two) CPUs are due primarily to the bus design of the processors, not due to SMP.

    The EVE6 bus, much like the Itanium bus, should really begin to approach the Linear scalibility we're all looking for out of properly written applications.



    // EvilJohn
    // Java Geek

  • I gave up on DP Athlons. (Score:4)

    by popular ( 301484 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @06:46PM (#457309) Homepage
    I would very much like to see a pair of dually GHz+ Tbirds with a GB of DDR RAM, but it just ain't going to happen.

    The 760MP has been more than a passing interest to me lately, and I've been digging up information/rumors about it daily for the past week. This is what is sounds like:

    One EV6 bus requires a hefty chunk of PCB. Two will require even more (of course). This means that DP Athlon boards will require as many as 8 layers to fit into an ATX form factor. IIRC, the industry standard is 4 or 6, so this would be a new (and likely expensive) manufacturing process that may require new tooling to produce in bulk.

    Athlon boards are already more expensive than P3 boards, and I think the overall DP price/performance comparison isn't going to be that bad for Intel when/if 760MP ships.

    --

  • "Juicy"? (Score:5)

    by JoeGee ( 85189 ) on Sunday February 04, 2001 @07:14PM (#457310)

    Maybe peyote juice?

    But then again we must remember that this story has been promoted to front page material by the same group that brought us nanopants.

    That's not a grain of salt the editor mentions, that's a rock of crack ...

    But I digress ...

    Why do I strongly suspect this is non-authentic? Does anyone else remember the photograph of the modified Duron that was supposedly being produced by AMD to thwart overclockers. A pin was physically "removed" from the pin interface.

    The picture was posted all over the place. Everyone was all up in arms. It was the end of all things.

    And then someone noticed that this "modified" processor had the same serial number as an unaltered promotional processor photo from another web site.

    NEW FLASH: Overzealous Tech Sites Taken in by Paintshop Pro Forgery ...

    Many Japanese tech sites are notorious for posting outrageously altered faux benchmark screens. This would appear to be another one of those posts ...

    Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am certain. But this is as ridiculous as the recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater than two times increase in speed between one processor and two ... Yup.

    Why couldn't I find people who believe things like this when I was selling electronics? I'd have made a fortune in commission. :)

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