iWill - Purely Servers
iWill's booth was particularly interesting; the company has been re-inventing themselves as a strictly server manufacturer.
iWill was one of the first to introduce a 8-socket Opteron server:
Their first solution featured two 4-socket motherboards basically layered on top of one another. The problem with this solution was that performing maintanence on any components on the lower motherboard required a pretty time-intensive removal of the top motherboard.
iWill's second try at an 8-socket Opteron server implements a much more intelligent setup:
Instead of placing two motherboards on top of one another, iWill's prototype features two boards on the same plane. One board features all of the PCI-X and PCI Express slots, while the other board is home to four HTX Pro connectors.
The HTX Pro interface is one actually defined by iWill and uses Hyper Transport to connect two-socket cards to the motherboard.
The beauty of this approach is that processor boards can be added/removed independently of one another. If AMD should introduce a DDR2 interface for future Opterons, all you need are new processor boards, and you can upgrade your current server to support the new CPUs.
iWill also showcased their new SFF, the ZMAXd2:
The beauty of the ZMAXd2 is that it features two PCI Express x16 slots and two Socket-940 CPU sockets, truly making for a powerful SFF. The SFF uses the nForce4 SLI chipset, so you can actually run two single-slot NVIDIA GPUs in SLI mode.
Like iWill's previous dual CPU SFF, the ZMAXd2 only features two memory slots off of one of the Opteron sockets - thus, the other Opteron must communicate over the Hyper Transport links connecting the two CPUs to gain access to main memory. Obviously, this solution is a bit higher latency than a conventional 2-socket system, but in order to improve performance a bit, iWill uses two HT links to connect the two Opteron CPUs together.
From what we can tell, the ZMAXd2 is an extremely powerful, yet very compact 2-socket Opteron system. With the introduction of AMD's dual core Opterons, you could potentially have a 4-core SLI system in a SFF case, which is pretty exciting.
Final Words
We still have tons of meetings left in the day, so it's back to the grind for us. There's much more coming, so stay tuned.
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ArneBjarne - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Reflex - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
#15 - Nope, the cards I mention have superior output to DD, however they will pass on DD content just fine to a reciever in digital mode if your source is encoded. DD is a lower end standard, its compression and no quality sound card will use lossy compression on audio by default.If quality sound is important to you, you can simply run 3 analog lines to a reciever and have a better sound experience than Soundstorm from virtually any modern card. And the ones I reccomended will give you a superior sound experience to Soundstorm for a reasonable price.
Granted, running a single cable is nice and all, but saving five minutes of time is not worth degraded sound to anyone who cares about audio quality and accuracy.
missleman - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Plenty of sound cards that offer dolby digital live output? Where are you looking? None of the ones you suggested offer that. Too many people just completly fail to realize the importance of DD encoding and how it fits perfectly in a home theater setting. There is NO replacement. PCM is not good enough.#2 and 3,
Go find me a SSD that costs $50 empty. Found one yet?
Ok, lets make it "easier"- find me a SSD that has a BIOS chip on it, or is connected over a SATA/PATA/SCSI so it is bootable. (The only ones I've seen that even qualify are external SCSI ones that are like upwards of $10,000- now granted it's been a long long time since I've looked, but I havn't found any that would qualify to fit in a segment that a high end home user would be able to afford). Considering the cheapest SSD cards i've seen are upwards of $500 empty, one could populate the $50 card with 4 Gig for the same cost as, say the rocket drive...empty, which cannot be booted. a $50 MSRP puts the card in the "affordable segment" for the first time. 4 Gig is plenty for the OS + some more frequently used apps. Heck with 2 of those I could remove the hard drive in my HTPC and have enough room for everything plus some room to record tv shoes (moving anything I want to save to a remote data server.) Which would REALLY make my HTPC silent, as the HD is the only thing you can hear right now, the one slow spinning(5 volted) fan makes virtually no noise.
Reflex - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
#8 - There are plenty of sound cards with far superior sound quality to the SoundStorm without the Creative name on them. On the cheap you can get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which is still a top notch sound solution. For a bit more money you can pick up an M-Audio Revolution 7.1, which simply has no equal in the consumer audio market.No reason to cry over spilt milk. SS was great for an integrated solution, but it didn't compete with stand alone solutions at all.
shaw - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Stability is just one reboot away.WooDaddy - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Tell me that Iwill SFF isn't sweet?! Dual CPU with SLI in a SFF case? Wow...I still like my slow Mac mini though :)
CONVERT TO YOUR TRUE LEADER (Steve Jobs) OR FACE MORE BLUE SCREENS OF DEATH!!!
semo - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
porkster, amd does not have enough market share to command form factor trends. btx was intel's brainchild but it is consumers and case and mobo manufacturers that are holding back the btx take up.ImJacksAmygdala - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
#8 Don't worry now that Nvidia has abandoned Sound Storm I can now consider the ATI Crossfire paired with the HDA Digital XMystique 7.1 sound card that has Dolby Live. This way I can get a dual R520 system with H.264 GPU acceleration and surround sound in games using a single digital coax to my Onkyo HT-S770.porkster - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
I wanted BTX when I purchased my latest system, but there were no one selling them or making the boards witht he form factor.I'm sick of AMD keeping the market behind.
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yacoub - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Did you have a chance to lament to NVidia execs the loss of SoundStorm2 that was intially spec'd for NForce4?I still enjoy the SoundStorm digital coax output on my NForce2 Deluxe board to my Z-680s. I loathe the thought of ever having to buy a Creative Labs soundcard again so I will have to hunt down a board with decent onboard sound, hoping to find one at least as good as SoundStorm was. =\