Intel Developer Forum - Fall 2001: Day 2

ServerWorks: The bandwidth kings

At the Spring 2001 IDF we brought you some of the first pictures from ServerWorks' Grand Champion chipset. The chipset is finally ready and they are simply waiting for OEM support for the platform which will increase tremendously after the launch of the quad-processor Xeon.

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The chipset will be available in a couple of versions: the Grand Champion-HE (GC-HE) and the Grand Champion-LE (GC-LE). The GC-HE supports 4-way Xeon MP processors and actually has a 4-way interleaved 64-bit DDR200 SDRAM controller. This means that the memory controller offers a peak bandwidth of 6.4GB/s. When dealing with the incredible I/O requirements of today's high-end servers this kind of serious memory bandwidth is necessary.

The heatsink/fan in this picture is located on the North Bridge of the Grand Champion HE chipset.

The GC-LE is ServerWorks' 2P solution and features a 2-way interleaved 64-bit DDR200 SDRAM controller. The reason for only choosing DDR200 is because it runs at the same base frequency as the Xeon's quad-pumped FSB (100MHz) which improves latency.

Both Tyan and MSI were at the show with ServerWorks based solutions. This was the first time MSI this sort of a presence at IDF and it marks their entry into the workstation/server market.

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