Sunday, November 2nd 2008
AMD Shanghai Hits Stores
"Shanghai" is the codename for the soon to be released quad-core enterprise processors by AMD, under the Quad-Core Opteron brand. It was expected of the company, to come up with these processors around this time of the year, and they have. AMD hasn't officially announced these processors yet, but the processors have made for early listings in some popular online stores. PC Connection and Buy.com have made listings of some of the upcoming SKUs. The Opteron 837x, 838x series are anything but cheap. These are processors that support multi-socket setups up to eight sockets. The Opteron 238x series processors are the dual-socket supportive variant of the same processors.From the listings, the pricing of these processors looks like:
AMD Opteron 83xx series:
Source:
CNET
AMD Opteron 83xx series:
- Opteron 8380 (2.50 GHz) - $1,768
- Opteron 8382 (2.60 GHz) - $2,177
- Opteron 8378 (2.40 GHz) - $1,360
- Opteron 2380 (2.50 GHz) - $814
- Opteron 2382 (2.60 GHz) - $1,019
42 Comments on AMD Shanghai Hits Stores
www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1639/4/patriot_warp_v2_128gb_2_5_solid_state_drive/index.html
Anyways, I suppose these processors in a multi socket motherboard will be Video Editor and Encoder's dream ?
How many sockets do the motherboards have ?
What else would one do with such a multi socket beast ?
^For a Phenom X4. The first 1800 MHz is what connects the CPU crossbar to the northbridge. The other 200 MHz (400 MT/s) links you see, are rudimentary in a Phenom X4 or Opteron 2xxx. In Opteron Shanghai 8xxx, they are used to form daisy-chains with neighbouring sockets. Err...run a server?
2 sockets means 8 cores. A 4 socket board (www.tyan.com) will have 16 cores!!! Expect to spent a pretty penny on that board.
Video editing, audio, content creation and the usual workstation stuff is where the majority of this stuff live but the 8 Series is generally found in high performance servers.
I use mine for testing consumer and enterprise hard drives. The main reason is because the nForce workstation chipsets like the 3500 are so stable and has a lot of PCIe options. Since I use one X16 slot for a video card, another for a SAS controller and another for a discrete SATA controller my options were fairly limited. Then again I have been using dual socket systems since the PIII days and just like the quality found in this level of products.
looks nice, but that price is far from it....
The price is right where you should expect it to be. These are the processors that compete with Xeons and where AMD makes their real money. I typically pick my Opterons up from 'other sources' though.
I never understood the difference between a server server and a quad core PC Desktop behaving as a server.
Why does a server need so many cores ?
Web servers, many low dollar hosting places put thousands of website on one server.
File Servers are a lot like database servers but the data is larger and not as random.
PassMark has a good simulation of server and workstation loads. This is actually a hard drive test but it does scale well depending on the platform used.
www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1639/8/patriot_warp_v2_128gb_2_5_solid_state_drive/index.html
The numbers are in MB/s.
One thing that we are going to see a lot of in the coming weeks is articles on virtualization. AMD is asking the sites that will recieve systems to write something up on virtualization.
This is where you have server acting as many. Imagine a 16 way server doing the work of 8 smaller servers. The cost of power is greatly reduced and for a medium sized company they can turn several servers into one. One server could run their website, intranet, file server, databases, DHCP, WINS, and the company Torrent traffic (you know your IT guy has one stashed away somewhere).
In gamers terms, if you could manage to hook up 1 computer to 8 monitors, keyboards and mice you could have a small LAN party in your living roon with one system. That really isn't possible now but the day is coming. Instead of you and 7 buddies trying to pull 50 amps out of the 20 amp socket you could use all 20 with one server that you all share.
Big up for internet fame!
I had to 'lol' at these prices.