Intel found to be abusing market power in Japan

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Well, with dual-core, Opteron will be 8-way capable, right? That's
getting to be a serious box!
Click to expand...

Opteron is 8-way capable today, but the mechanics get a little
problematic. There is no reason to assume that a dual-Opteron can't reach
8-way on a 4-W board. If you're thinking of a 16P system, AIUI, it's not
going to happen. There would have to be changes to the coherent HT links
for that to happen. I don't see it, but...
 
Ed said:
5U rack-optimized servers delivers the 8-Way Opteron power and
performance. http://www.iwillusa.com/product_1.asp?pl1_id=63

I only see 4 CPU, 4 on top - 4 on bottom?
Ed
Click to expand...

I don't think that isn't the one I had read about.

The one you linked to uses "2 x IWILL QK8S-HT Quad AMD Opteron
system board", but I recall that in the pics of the system I was
thinking of there were two distinctly different boards. The
"lower" one was sort of L shaped while the upper one was a simple
rectangle.

Regardless, the IWill system is very interesting.
 
snip
Either Intel finds a way for Dell to sell Itanium systems that is
profitable for Dell, or that's it for Itanium, but don't underestimate
Dell/Intel. The incentive for Dell, other than being obedient to
Santa Clara, is that it wants to be in the higher margin businesses
just like everybody else does.
Click to expand...
They can enter those higher margin businesses with the X86-64 from
Intel, whatever the code name is.
Opteron hasn't yet and may not ever penetrate much beyond the 2 and
4-way space. That's the next line of defense. If Dell as a volume
purveyor of bigger SMP boxes is the way it goes down, Dell will wind
up killing margin rather than capturing it, as it always does.
Click to expand...

Go to your strength. Dell's is having the most efficient, lowest cost,
most turns, lowest inventory manufacturing. That allows them to compete
on price. Near as I can tell, not much added value functionality in a
Dell. As opposed to a Del. :-)

In a commodity type market that is a great advantage.
Intel manages to establish Itanium as the worthy competitor to Power
it wants it to be, Dell creates the value proposition for itanium, and
all hell breaks loose again. Or not.

One indicator will be market penetration by Opteron in the 8-way space
and higher, and how Intel reacts. x86 is already getting hardware
virtualization. If x86 starts to acquire the RAS features Intel now
intends only for Itanium, we will know that Itanium is dead.
Click to expand...

Have you reviewed the "Hurricane" chip set stuff from IBM? Lots of RAS
and it uses X86-64.
The alternatives are: use x86 for mainframe applications (politically
unacceptable, IMHO), continue investing in Sparc, or become dependent
on IBM.
Click to expand...
HP is investing in Sparc? Or is that what is in a nonstop box?
 
Rob Stow said:
I don't think that isn't the one I had read about.

The one you linked to uses "2 x IWILL QK8S-HT Quad AMD Opteron
system board", but I recall that in the pics of the system I was
thinking of there were two distinctly different boards. The
"lower" one was sort of L shaped while the upper one was a simple
rectangle.

Regardless, the IWill system is very interesting.
Click to expand...

newisys. now a unit of some contract manufacturer.
 
Delbert said:
newisys. now a unit of some contract manufacturer.
Click to expand...

Newisys was bought up by Appro.

Nothing more than a quad is shown at either the Appro of the
Newisys web sites.

Found some news other 8-way boxes:

This first one is the best I've seen so far - a Tyan based 8-way box:
http://www.digit-life.com/news.html?114783
Features nForce4 Pro chipset and two 16 lane PCI-E slots.

Also:
http://www.verari.com/news/archive/PR110904_1.asp

This one is very interesting:
http://www.hpcsystems.com/products/svr_a5880hs_future.html
It seems to have 2 processors, 8 DIMM slots, PCI-X slots, IDE
sockets, USB ports, etc, on the lower board; on the upper board
there are 6 CPUs and 24 DIMM slots and nothing else.


Lots more is easily found with this search:
"8-way opteron server AMD"
Tacking that "AMD" on at the end somehow made a big difference is
filtering out a lot of irrelevant crap.
 
In comp.sys.intel Delbert Cecchi said:
HP is investing in Sparc? Or is that what is in a nonstop box?
Click to expand...

Ah, no... I believe NonStop boxes use MIPS CPUs, slated IIRC to
migrate to Itanium.

rick jones

BTW, I would have thought that in this context the value-add is from
Delbert - value-add from Del seems to be over in comp.arch :)
 
snip
I thought it was bought by Sanmina SCI last summer, but I can't find any
reference.
Click to expand...

Yep. Isn't NewIsys the outfit that was started up a few years ago by a
bunch of the geniuses that used to be in Austin. Phil Hester comes to
mind.

A quick google turns up http://www.amdboard.com/newisys.html full of
talk of the Horus chip (set?) and all the wonderous 32 way opteron
servers it would enable. Sun is reputed to be a customer.

del cecchi
 
I thought it was bought by Sanmina SCI last summer, but I can't find any
reference.
Click to expand...

You are correct. It is Samina SCI.

Go to www.newisys.com, click on the "about us" tab, and that'll tell you
that Newisys was acquired by Samina SCI in July of 2003.
 
keith said:
Opteron is 8-way capable today, but the mechanics get a little
problematic. There is no reason to assume that a dual-Opteron can't reach
8-way on a 4-W board. If you're thinking of a 16P system, AIUI, it's not
going to happen. There would have to be changes to the coherent HT links
for that to happen. I don't see it, but...
Click to expand...

Or an external chipset, like Horus, or Serverworks/Sun's new chipset.

Yousuf Khan
 
Have you reviewed the "Hurricane" chip set stuff from IBM? Lots of RAS
and it uses X86-64.
Click to expand...

I couldn't find anything but PR stuff. Three years, $100 million, and
38% increase in performance only go so far as incentives to keep
reading.
HP is investing in Sparc? Or is that what is in a nonstop box?
Click to expand...

Ah, no, my careless writing. Fujitsu Siemans has the Sparc option. I
have no idea what HP would do, since everything is slated to go to
Itanium.

RM
 
Delbert said:
A quick google turns up http://www.amdboard.com/newisys.html full of
talk of the Horus chip (set?) and all the wonderous 32 way opteron
servers it would enable. Sun is reputed to be a customer.
Click to expand...

I think Sun is supposed to be the exclusive customer of a Serverworks
chipset that is an alternative to the Newisys chipset. The Serverworks
chipset uses some Sun IP apparently.

Yousuf Khan
 
Or an external chipset, like Horus, or Serverworks/Sun's new chipset.
Click to expand...

Okay, but we aren't talking about the same thing anymore. AIUI, the AMD
NUMA architecture is sufficiently UMA to be UMA as long as the local
interconnects (hypertransport) are used. Once another bridge is used,
this breaks down and we really have a NUMA system. No?
 
keith said:
Okay, but we aren't talking about the same thing anymore. AIUI, the AMD
NUMA architecture is sufficiently UMA to be UMA as long as the local
interconnects (hypertransport) are used. Once another bridge is used,
this breaks down and we really have a NUMA system. No?
Click to expand...

Well, even if they used bog-standard Hypertransport to try and go beyond
8P, they may find that the number of hops makes a difference to the
latency that would take it outside of the domain of Sufficiently UMA.

However, there is some talk that the next generation Opterons will be
able to connect to 32-processors all by itself. That would likely
indicate that AMD is planning to increase the number of external HTT
channels per processor.

Yousuf Khan
 
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