Supermicro Announces Quad-Opteron 1U Motherboard

hpcanswers writes "Supermicro, a producer of systems for the high-performance computing market, has announced a 1U-sized quad Opteron motherboard for the OEM market. The product, which is on display at CeBIT this week, supports both HyperTransport and PCI Express. It also consumes 1000 watts of power. Supermicro's announcement is all the more interesting because the company has historically only supported Intel processors."

Historically huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I've got 20 1U and 2U supermicro opteron servers. Are you sure you researched this statement?

Space heater

[iamplupp]

"It also consumes 1000 watts of power" 1000W seems a little high... Four dual core opterons doesent need half of that! Even less for single core. The article suggest using 55W opterons.

Intel's dominance at play here

[hirschma]

Supermicro has offered AMD solutions [supermicro.com] for a quite while now - just not under their "main" brand name. If you don't know that their Aplus products exist, you won't find them. Although I'm sure no one would go on record, I'd wager that Intel has pressured a heavily Intel-dependent vendor to not promote AMD's product.

In fact, go to SuperMicro's home page [supermicro.com], and you'll notice no mention or links to their AMD based products.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. When AMD first shipped the Athlon, very few board makers dared to ship Athlon solutions [tomshardware.com] for fear of Intel shorting them on chipsets. I recall, but cannot substantiate, that Asus and Abit first shipped Athlon boards under a "shadow brand", much as Supermicro is doing here.

I, for one, cannot wait to buy some of the Supermicro^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h, um, Aplus gear.

Re:Space heater

[CrayHill]

As per TFA, they use a 1000-watt power supply. It does not consume a 1000 watts of power.

Re:Space heater

[Homology]

Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable. The Opteron 870 is rated as max 95W, so four of them gives approximately 400W. A few SCSI hard disks that may use as much as 30W at startup, much memory, lots of cooling, and whatever the motherboard itself consumes, and we have easily another 100W. While a 1KW PSU seems much, it does not seem excessive.

Re:Historically huh?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Yes - but A year ago [theregister.co.uk]

You're a moron

[Dr. Spork]

If you read the article, you'd find that each of the Opterons in it will use 55 watts. Since you're stupid, I won't take any chances and do the calculation for you: 55 X 4 = 220 Watts of power (plus a bit extra for running the chipset and drives). That's not bad for what is essentially 8 cpu's! The recommended (read the spec sheet) 1000 watt power supply is there to insure perfectly stable voltages. It would be overkill for anything except applications where maximum uptime is essential (like web serving).

For the sake of comparison, I run a 530 Watt PSU on this system, which draws about 100 Watts from the wall. Yaay for cool-running AMDs!

how about 16 cores?

[Ankou]

Maby you cant fit it in 1u, but Tyan makes the K8QW that supports 8 Opterons with the M4881 add on processor board. Meaning you got 16 cores of pure powa. Go ahead, compile the internet. [tyan.com] I'd be interested in knowing if there was anything higher than that.

Manufacturer says ... (.Score +2 Flamebait)

[tomhudson]

The specs from supermicro's site [supermicro.com] say it requires a 1kw minimum psu for stability.

mportant Chassis Notes

To ensure system stability, a 1000W (minimum) ATX power supply [8-pin (+12V), 8-pin (+12V) and 24-pin are required]

That's a LOT of juice!

Re:Uh?

[symbolset]

Recommended 1KW power supply is not the same thing as consumes 1KW of power. The motherboard itself almost certainly consumes less than 100. It's the other stuff you might choose to plug into it that starts burning the watts. Four of this http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/opteron/details.as px?opn=OSA850AVWOF [amdcompare.com], for example, would max out at 356W TDP. By the time you add VR efficiency and PSU efficiency into that equation you're pegging >550W of wall power just for the processors.

If you actually built a rack full of 22-24 1KW 1U servers you should probably apply some forethought to how you're going to get rid of more heat than is generated by four of these:http://www.paragonweb.com/TNF1613.cfm [paragonweb.com]. Also, you should probably have the power company increase the multiplier on your meter, lest it spin like an AOL CD on an angle grinder: http://homepages.newnet.co.uk/martynarnold/aol.htm [newnet.co.uk]

Re:Space heater

[ivan256]

Even dual processor 1U Xeon boxes typically have dual-redundant 1000W power supplies.

You never know what an enterprise user is going to stick in the expansion slots.

Re:Off topic but... Why?

[TheRaven64]

For more information on this topic, see here [slashdot.org].

Thay have duel opteron boards with Full X16 SLI

[Joe123456]

some of thoes boards have HyperTransport slots, pci-x, pci-e, scsi and sata. Thay sell them as

High-End PCI-e Graphics (SLI Supported)
High Performance Gaming Workstation
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n/nForce/H8DCE.cfm [supermicro.com]

1. Dual AMD® Opteron(TM) Support, (Dual Core Ready) 1000 MHz HyperTransport Link

2. nVidia® nForce Pro 2200 (CK804) / nVidia® nForce Pro 2050 (CKIO4) Chipset

3. Up to 16GB DDR400 SDRAM (or) Up to 16GB DDR333 SDRAM (or) Up to 32GB DDR266 SDRAM

4. Dual-port Gigabit LAN / Ethernet Controller

5. 8 SATA ports

6. 2 (x16) PCI-Express, 2 (x4 using x8 slot) PCI-Express, 3 32-bit 33MHz PCI

7. AC97 6 channel Audio

8. 8 Fan support with Speed Control

H8DCE-HTe is the same with
        1 HyperTransport slot, 2(x16) PCI-Express, 1 (x4 using x8 slot) PCI-Express, 3 32-bit 33MHz PCI

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n/nForce/H8DCi.cfm [supermicro.com]

1. Dual AMD® Opteron(TM) Support, (Dual Core Ready) 1000 MHz HyperTransport Link

2. nVidia® nForce Pro 2200 (CK804) / nVidia® nForce Pro 2050 (CKIO4) / AMD8132 Chipset

3. Up to 16GB DDR400 SDRAM (or) Up to 32GB DDR333 SDRAM (or) Up to 32GB DDR266 SDRAM

4. 2 Single-port Gigabit (CK804/IO4) LAN / Ethernet Controller

5. 4 SATA ports

6. 2 PCI-Express x16, 1 PCI-Express x4, 2 PCI-X 133/100MHz, 1 PCI-X 100MHz, 1 32-bit 33MHz PCI

7. AC97 6 channel Audio

8. 8 Fan support with Speed Control

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Optero n/nForce/H8DC8.cfm [supermicro.com]

1. Dual AMD® Opteron(TM) Support, (Dual Core Ready) 1000 MHz HyperTransport Link

2. nVidia® nForce Pro 2200 (CK804) / nVidia® nForce Pro 2050 (CKIO4) / AMD8132 Chipset

3. Up to 16GB DDR400 SDRAM (or) Up to 32GB DDR333 SDRAM (or) Up to 32GB DDR266 SDRAM

4. 2 Single-port Gigabit (CK804/IO4) LAN / Ethernet Controller

5. 4 SATA ports

6. 2 PCI-Express x16, 1 PCI-Express x4, 2 PCI-X 133/100MHz, 1 PCI-X 100MHz, 1 32-bit 33MHz PCI

7. AC97 6 channel Audio

8. 8 Fan support with Speed Control

SCSI * Dual Ultra320 SCSI drives with Host RAID * Adaptec AIC-7902W Dual-Channel Controller

ZCR * Supports Supermicro All-In-One Zero Channel RAID card AOC-LPZCR1 (or) * Adaptec 2010S or Adaptec 2020S

1000 Watt power supply, NOT 1000 Watts of power

[speedplane]

"It also consumes 1000 watts of power."
WRONG!
The board requires a 1000 Watt power supply, not neccesarily 1000 watts of power. The power supply is the upper limit of how much the board can consume. Most computers come with a 300 watt power supply even though they normally use only about 100 Watts.
That being said, this board probably consumes quite a bit of power (but much less than 1000 watts) if it needs such a heavy duty power supply.

Re:"1U?"

[Rick Genter]

If, on the other hand, you use Google to search for 1u [google.com], the very first link gives a nice, detailed explanation [webopedia.com] on exactly what 1U means.

Re:Off topic but... Why?

[Rick Genter]

It would just seem to make sense to me that the world of computing would come up with a standard for using DC, and then companies would build big power supplies that would offer redundancy, power backup, and current conditioning. It would save money, power and space.

In fact, in the telco world, this is exactly how it works. The standard is to use -48vDC. Sun (among other manufacturers) makes servers that run directly off of DC [sun.com] (the Netra 120 on the referenced page).

Re:Is this Google's new brain?

[ScriptedReplay]

i'll be dead before using a gamer chipset for serious usage

what you don't realise is that it's not your regular NForce4 gamer's chipset. nVidia has a separate professional line, see here [nvidia.com] to which this one (nForce pro 2200) belongs.

Re:"1U?"

[Antique Geekmeister]

1U is exactly 1.75" high. It's an old standard for putting the holes in 19" and 24" racks, designed to allow devices of different heights to be stacked efficiently by having the screw holes laid out according to certain well-defined patterns. The patterns are quite old, and caused a lot of problems when the US tried to switch to metric (and basically failed in the computer manufacturing industry).

Re:Space heater

[evilviper]

BAD MODS! NO COOKIE!

Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable.

No, NO, NO, NO, NO! It doesn't matter if you have a 10% effecient power supply, or a 100% effecient power supply. A 1000WATT power supply will OUTPUT 1000WATTS. The difference in effeciency is how much INPUT power it will need to do that, and how much waste heat it will produce in the process.

Power supplies are not, and have never been, rated by their INPUT. That would be just stupid, as it would seriously penalize those companies that make more energy-effecient units.