First Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted

MojoDog writes "Today Universal Abit launched their AW9D and AW9D-MAX motherboards based on the Intel 975X chipset. There has been much anticipation in the industry for this series and as far as looks go, these boards are built to please. One interesting bullet point in the spec list is that these boards are "Quad Core Ready", in line with a possible year-end release of Intel's Quad-Core Kentsfield CPU perhaps? Time will tell!"

Re:But!

[nxtw]

no, these motherboards are for the LGA775 socket, not the LGA771 socket used by the Xeons in the Mac Pro or the Socket 479 used by the iMac/Mac notebooks/Mac mini.

"Clovertown" may be a quad-core version of the "Woodcrest" Xeon chips used in the Mac Pro, although I couldn't find anything definitive.

I'm not sure if Intel has any plans for quad-core mobile chips (the Core Duo used in the iMac/Mac Mini is the mobile-oriented chip, but has shown up in smaller desktop computers incl. the Macs).

Re:Why no ECC?

[Ironsides]

How can a motherboard have all this stuff and leave out ECC? I would never buy a motherboard without ECC. Don't people want their machines to stay up more than a week at a time???

I've run multiple systems with non-ECC memmory. Uptime was originaly limited by time between brownouts/blackouts (~3 months). Then I got a UPS and uptimes have only gone up. If you need ECC to keep your system up for more than a week, you've got problems.

Re:But!

[FuturePastNow]

Clovertown and Kentsfield are identical except for the socket and bus speeds they use. So, yes, Clovertown is the quad core version of Woodcrest (like Kentsfield, it's actually two dual-core processors on one package) and will work fine in the Mac Pro (unless Apple does something silly and uses firmware to block upgrades).

Re:Why no ECC?

[Anonymous Coward]

ECC is usually slower, hence are automatically worse to a lot of people.

First? Not really. There's already the GA-965P-DQ6

[bmchan]

I'm not ready to state that GA-965P-DQ6 is the "fist", but it's the first one I found out about (months ago). I've already got this MB running with a Core 2 Duo E6600, and it specifically states on the manufacturer "Ready for next generation Quad Core processor".

http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Motherboard/P roducts_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2295 [gigabyte-usa.com]

I vote to change the name of the article "Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted" to "Another Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted".

Re:Their 965-based AB9 Pro is not very good.

[Sadiekiller]

haha yea. I have a Intel-945PVS. untill i got a decent power supply, you woudl have to turn it on and off two times to get it to boot. then it tookout my Graphics card with itself one day. now i have a good PSU, but it still refuses to boot after a restart. i have to turn it off all the way, or it wont boot.

Re:But!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was actually meaning that because quad-core will be available in a 'desktop' chip, the 'quad core' systems Apple is selling should drop in price. (After all, if you could get a quad core iMac at 2.93 GHz, why pay $2000 more for a quad core Mac Pro at 3.0 GHz?)

But, I have it on good authority (inside information, hence my AC posting,) that the server quad-core chips will come out first. So it will be more likely that the Mac Pro will become an eight-core system. (I have no inside info at Apple, only Intel.) The quad core Xeons will be coming out this year. The desktop chips aren't so certain, and may be delayed until January. (Also, the desktop chips WILL be moving to a 1333MHz bus, at least for the 'Extreme' parts, so if you want 'future-proofing', I would avoid any motherboard that doesn't support this bus speed.)

Re:Why no ECC?

[Ironsides]

Uh.. What does altitude have to do with ECC? I'm guessing you mean the Virginia Tech apple supercomputer. Altitude in blacksburg VA is maybe 1000 feet above sea level.

Re:Why no ECC?

[VENONA]

Cosmic rays can flip a bit, and have biological effects. Cosmic ray arrival rates are related to your altitude. Blacksburg VA may be only a thousand feet up, but Los Alamos is more like 8-9K--can't remember, exactly. But it's considerably higher than Santa Fe, which is about 7K.

Also, you may not be able to accept single-bit errors, even at the lower rate you'd experience at sea level. What's good enough for a Joe Gamer's PC in Denver (5K feet) may not be remotely good enough for mission-critical servers. Wall Street is at sea level, for the purposes of this discussion. But you can bet they don't always look at random bit-flips kindly.

As usual, how you spec a machine depends upon what you're planning to do with it. That even filters down into whatever spares you may stock for a server farm. Compare mfg. memory prices for large multi-CPU (think 8-64 CPUs, not some generic 4-way) servers running Solaris or HP-UX to memory available from the mass market vendors. Last time I did that, the mfg. memory was about 10X more expensive than something generic that would at least boot your system.

In that environment you need to be sure that the memory you're buying really is equivalent--not just that the machine will still boot. In that case, BTW, it turned out that there was equivalent memory available, without paying a huge vendor markup. It wasn't as cheap as the rock-bottom stuff (which would still have yielded a bootable machine) but it was cheap enough to justify buying a (much cheaper) machine just to stress test it before adding it to the ready spares bin for production systems. Sometimes a four hour support contract is still too slow, but you don't want to pay six figures for a hot backup system. Which also has to be under that expensive service contract.

If you have TB of memory to deal with, and mission-critical means minimize or eliminate flipped bits, the rules change considerably. It's a whole different world.

God only knows what gyrations the NSA must go through. Oh, wait, they just pay vendor rates, no matter the cost. My tax dollars at work...