More details about 32-way Horus chipset for Opteron

Looks like Newisys is using a directory-based cache coherency chip to take
Opterons beyond their 4- or 8-way internal limitations. The people who
designed this chipset seem to be the same people who designed IBM's Summit
chipset for Xeon.

There's also some interesting chatter about why IBM chose not to use
Newisys's designs when most of the people who started Newisys were ex-IBM.
Some suggestion about protecting their Power and Xeon turf, or something or
another. :-)

http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...5-D9E87E37A90B

Yousuf Khan


--
Humans: contact me at ykhan at rogers dot com
Spambots: just reply to this email address ;-)

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
. cable.rogers.com...
Looks like Newisys is using a directory-based cache coherency chip to
take
Opterons beyond their 4- or 8-way internal limitations. The people who
designed this chipset seem to be the same people who designed IBM's
Summit
chipset for Xeon.

There's also some interesting chatter about why IBM chose not to use
Newisys's designs when most of the people who started Newisys were
ex-IBM.
Some suggestion about protecting their Power and Xeon turf, or
something or
another. :-)


http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...5-D9E87E37A90B

Yousuf Khan

It is absolutely positively not true that the folks from Newisys were
the ones who designed the Summit chipset. The Summit chipset was
designed by a group in Rochester, MN. I believe the Newisys guys
history is Austin. And Phil Hester hasn't been IBM for a long time.

del cecchi

"del cecchi" wrote ...

It is absolutely positively not true that the folks from Newisys were
the ones who designed the Summit chipset. The Summit chipset was
designed by a group in Rochester, MN.

If Summit is derived from Sequent's ccNUMA, then it wasn't a design
from scratch - the original designers would have been Sequent
engineers.

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 06:57:40 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Looks like Newisys is using a directory-based cache coherency chip to take
Opterons beyond their 4- or 8-way internal limitations. The people who
designed this chipset seem to be the same people who designed IBM's Summit
chipset for Xeon.

There's also some interesting chatter about why IBM chose not to use
Newisys's designs when most of the people who started Newisys were ex-IBM.
Some suggestion about protecting their Power and Xeon turf, or something or
another. :-)

Note that IBM's Opteron design is not an in-house design as the
article seems to suggest, it's actually an MSI server. Note the
resemblance:


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

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 06:57:40 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
Looks like Newisys is using a directory-based cache coherency chip to take
Opterons beyond their 4- or 8-way internal limitations. The people who
designed this chipset seem to be the same people who designed IBM's Summit
chipset for Xeon.

There's also some interesting chatter about why IBM chose not to use
Newisys's designs when most of the people who started Newisys were ex-IBM.
Some suggestion about protecting their Power and Xeon turf, or something or
another. :-)

http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...5-D9E87E37A90B


Err.. ok... Attempt number 2 at posting this message, hit the wrong
key last time :

IBM's server is not actually an in-house design, it was designed by
MSI. Here's a link to the two servers:

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver...325/index.html

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/produc...il.php?UID=510


So really there are no conspiracy theories required for why IBM did
not chose Newisys' design, they simply went for a lower-cost option
from MSI.

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

"M. Ranjit Mathews" wrote in message
om...
"del cecchi" wrote ...

It is absolutely positively not true that the folks from Newisys
were
the ones who designed the Summit chipset. The Summit chipset was
designed by a group in Rochester, MN.

If Summit is derived from Sequent's ccNUMA, then it wasn't a design
from scratch - the original designers would have been Sequent
engineers.

And if my aunt had nuts she'd be my uncle. Summit was a clean design by
Rochester. I don't recall Sequent even having been acquired when the
project started. I vas dere Charlie. The system was a joint effort by
Rochester, Austin and Raleigh. Beaverton was late to the party. The
chips were designed in Rochester.

del cecchi

del cecchi wrote:
"M. Ranjit Mathews" wrote in message
om...

"del cecchi" wrote ...


It is absolutely positively not true that the folks from Newisys

were

the ones who designed the Summit chipset. The Summit chipset was
designed by a group in Rochester, MN.

If Summit is derived from Sequent's ccNUMA, then it wasn't a design
from scratch - the original designers would have been Sequent
engineers.


And if my aunt had nuts she'd be my uncle.

That's one of the best lines I've heard it a while - have to remember
that one

Cheers,
Mike

Summit was a clean design by
Rochester. I don't recall Sequent even having been acquired when the
project started. I vas dere Charlie. The system was a joint effort by
Rochester, Austin and Raleigh. Beaverton was late to the party. The
chips were designed in Rochester.

del cecchi

"del cecchi" wrote in message
...

"M. Ranjit Mathews" wrote in message
om...
"del cecchi" wrote ...

It is absolutely positively not true that the folks from Newisys
were
the ones who designed the Summit chipset. The Summit chipset was
designed by a group in Rochester, MN.

If Summit is derived from Sequent's ccNUMA, then it wasn't a design
from scratch - the original designers would have been Sequent
engineers.

And if my aunt had nuts she'd be my uncle.

uhh... never mind. :-)

Summit was a clean design by
Rochester. I don't recall Sequent even having been acquired when the
project started. I vas dere Charlie. The system was a joint effort by
Rochester, Austin and Raleigh. Beaverton was late to the party. The
chips were designed in Rochester.

"Sequent" or IBM Beaverton did have a project underway at that time but it
was Itanium based only, the viper crossbar chipset was to build a 16x
NUMA/SMP using seperate address/data buses to connect 4x quads. Sequent put
all its eggs into the Monterey/Win64/Itanium basket.

The early NUMA-Q design for x86/Dynix is a modified SCI protocol in a ring
topology using the "datapump" chip.


-brig

Tony Hill wrote:
So really there are no conspiracy theories required for why IBM did
not chose Newisys' design, they simply went for a lower-cost option
from MSI.

No, but IBM has a reputation for going with best of breed products. The
Newisys servers with their management processors and high sophistication
would've fit into IBM's regular approach to server design.

Yousuf Khan

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:13:26 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Tony Hill wrote:
So really there are no conspiracy theories required for why IBM did
not chose Newisys' design, they simply went for a lower-cost option
from MSI.

No, but IBM has a reputation for going with best of breed products. The
Newisys servers with their management processors and high sophistication
would've fit into IBM's regular approach to server design.

That may well be IBM's reputation, but their product line-up doesn't
necessarily back up that reputation, at least when looking at low-end
x86 servers. Not that the MSI servers are bad at all, and they do
indeed have build in management processors. Newisys' design might be
slightly higher end, but the specs on the two servers aren't really
all that different.

FWIW the e325 Opteron server is not the only system that MSI produces
for IBM. The near-identical e335/e336 Xeon servers are also produced
by MSI, and apparently also one of their 2U Xeon servers.

IBM's x86 server business has been kind of losing out to HP and
especially Dell over the past while. That likely has a lot to do with
going for a lower-cost option on these servers.

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