Commoditization of 4-way

FBRAM has yet to prove itself (or even come out).

This is true. Whether its FBRAM or the next technology is in question.
What is certain is that RAM presents a significant design challenge
for motherboard builders in terms of signal integrity and simple volume
of routing.

Hypertransport allows one to do something even more performance oriented for
the overgrowing PCI bus than PCI-E. It allows you to hang multiple PCI buses
directly off of separate processors, load balancing the load and
partitioning the data off in a way.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be how we'll start seeing
multiple x16 pci-e links for multi-display systems. I'm scared we
havent seen anyone advertising multiple graphics links.

Yes, the I/O bandwidth to feed these processors is essential, but a
fibre array does the job well enough across pci 66/64. the ability to
pipe network data every which way is extremely fun, but non essential.

Although this is certainly useful and advantageous, the fact of the
matter is that having multiple pci busses will not /initially/ be a
major factor in making 4 way systems cheaper, in commoditizing the
market. The main limitation as it stands is $3000 motherboards. When
someone kicks out an order of magnitude cheaper because they can and
because its simple, then we'll come back to the virtues of HT and the
multiple pci busses it can provide.

The problem is that until this event happens ($300 quad mobo), system
builders can make boards as cheap as they please or utilizing all the
excess amounts of HT glory they want, but they'll always charge $2000+
because sales would not differ signficantly from $1000. The market is
defined as high end servers, so presumably the customer is going to be
paying through the nose for 15k scsi raid and all those other goodies,
$1000 on a mobo here or there is nothing. When $300 quad comes out, the
tune changes a lot. Quad is suddenly considerable for web clusters.

I'd wager to define commoditization as the threshold where mainstream
enthusiasts (a contradiction in terms if i ever heard one) consider
building 4 way systems.

Myren

Jan Vorbrüggen wrote in message ...
opteron is amazing in that it has its switching technology built in via ht.

Yawn - the 21364 had that how many years ago?
Jan

And how many did they sell?

"myren, lord" wrote in message ...

fb-ram and pci-express, together, represent the greatest enabler of 4
way or better technologies. fb-ram will enable far less pins with far
less demanding specifications for those huge banks of ram hanging off
your processors: and advantage only compounded by a direct to cpu
connection. pci-express by its serial nature allows for further
simplification of a overgrowing pci bus, as well as, iirc, longer signal
paths.

FB-RAM pins operate in the 2.5GHz to 6GHz range. Anybody who thinks
a simple protocal makes operating at these pin speed easy should pass
the pipe.

Second, the push for FBDIMM is to enable even larger memory systems
not to save a few pins. With FBDIMM, an opteron can go from 8 DDR-II
DIMMs to 32 FBDIMMs using a similar number of pins. This allows even
larger memories to be built and capture ever more of the footprint
of the database applications.

PCI-express brings little to the party that HT does not already
bring except that Intel is pushing it rather than AMD.

"Mitch Alsup" wrote in message
om...
snip
PCI-express brings little to the party that HT does not already
bring except that Intel is pushing it rather than AMD.

PCI-Express doesn't crash and burn on an error.

del cecchi

"Mitch Alsup" wrote in message
om...

snip

PCI-express brings little to the party that HT does not already
bring except that Intel is pushing it rather than AMD.

And the fact that it preserves the investment in software of lots and lots
of PCI drivers that exist today. Preserving that investment was one of the
reasons that the Intel desktop people decided they wanted to do PCI Express
rather than sign on to IB.

--
- Stephen Fuld
e-mail address disguised to prevent spam

i thought intel was one of the infiniband people too. infiniband and
pci-e arent mutually exlcusive technologies by any means.

parents said amd wasnt a fan of pci-e. are they designing any competition?

In article ,
Andi Kleen wrote:

As far as I can see the main difference in practice right now is that
there is a PCI-E connector and there isn't one for HT.

But there is a candidate for one -- if anyone is interested, I can put
you in touch with the people involved.

-- greg

On 18 May 2004 20:23:23 +0100 (BST), Thomas Womack
wrote:
In article e.rogers.com,
Yousuf Khan wrote:

The following article expects that AMD will take the price of 4-way systems
down from an average of $10,000 to $5000 by next year.

The price of a 4-way system is not much over $5000 *now*, isn't it?
$1700 for the Tyan board, $2800 for four Opteron 844's, $250 for a chassis,
and, well, you get one SATA disc and only one of the Opterons gets any memory
with the change from $5000.

Even with such an incredibly stripped-down system you're still looking
at $5000, but for all practical 4P Opteron systems you're looking at
about $10,000 as a base price. Also, Opterons are very reasonably
priced as far as 4P systems go. XeonMPs will tend to cost you more,
and the price only goes up from there when you start looking at
Itaniums, IBM Power chips, Sun SPARC chips, etc.

FWIW the absolute cheapest that HP will sell you a 4P Opteron server
for is $11,297. That gets you 4 Opteron 842 (1.6GHz) chips and 2GB of
memory, For comparison, the absolute cheapest 4P Intel XeonMP
server that HP sells will set you back $11,265, but there you only get
4 2.0GHz XeonMP chips and 1GB of memory. With Itanium things start
getting REAL pricey. A bare-bones 4P Itanium2 systems from HP will
set you back $31,555, and that only gets you 4 x 1.3GHz/3MB L3 chips
and 1GB of memory.

I wonder if AMD will drop the Opteron 840 price enormously at some stage;
4 x 1400MHz with separate memory to each processor isn't bad for, say, a
shell-account machine.

Highly unlikely. They've already got their 840, 842 and 844 all
priced exactly the same, $698. VERY reasonable price as compared to
the competition, but very unlikely to drop any further. Normally when
you start seeing price parity with higher speed chips like that it
means that the slower models are in the process of being discontinued.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Tue, 18 May 2004 15:54:33 -0600, Rob Stow
wrote:
Never anonymous Bud wrote:
Where did you find a price? I can't locate ANYONE that has that MB available.

$1545 at Lynn Computer, up from $1495 a couple of weeks ago.
They are taking orders only - no stock yet.
http://www.lynncomp.com


Ahh the infamous Lynn Computers. They ALWAYS take orders for thing,
regardless of whether or not they plan on getting them in stock! That
store is constantly listing products that won't ship for months.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Tue, 18 May 2004 22:15:11 GMT, Never anonymous Bud
wrote:
When I can get a 4-way Opty MB for about $500, and the
CPUs for about $350 apiece, I'll consider the price almost
in my range.

Hopefully that time might be coming soon, that's what started this
whole thread. The trick is that next year AMD is expecting to ship
dual-core Opterons that are pin-compatible and
infrastructure-compatible with existing single-core Opterons. If all
goes according to plan they will be drop-in replacements for current
Opterons, so all you would need for a 4-core machine is a "2
processor" motherboard (whether or not that makes a true "4 processor"
system or just a "2 processor with dual cores" machine depends on your
point of view).

Those 2P motherboards start at only ~$200, though good ones will cost
you more like $500. No word yet on the price of the chips, but they
might sell for $350 a piece, and most likely will sell for less than
$700 a pop (2 cores for $700 will keep in your price range of
single-core for $350).

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca