NVidia chipsets (was Re: Any experience with "AsusA8N-SLi"or"Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI" mobos?)

[David O'Brien]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 07:32:28PM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> Astrodog wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:14:14 +1100, Jan Mikkelsen
> ><janm at transactionware.com> wrote:
> >
> >>David O'Brien wrote:
> >>
> >>>>(Incidentally, does anyone know anything about the HP DL385, or the HP
> >>>>Opteron blades, the BL25p and BL35p?)
> >>>
> >>>The *5 machines are opteron versions of the Xeon offerings.  See the *0
> >>>Xeon offerings to get a feel for the specs of the box.
> >>>I *believe* the DL385 uses the DL380 chassis.
> >>
> >>I am also interested in the chipsets they use.
> >>
> >>I believe the DL145 uses the AMD 8000 chipset, but I can't find any
> >>information on the newer servers.  I was concerned that they might use
> >>nVidia chipsets, like the new workstation.  However, on rereading the
> >>press release, they only tout the nVidia chipset for the workstation, so
> >>the servers probably use something much more boring!
> >>
> >>Regards,
> >>
> >>Jan.
> >
> >
> >I'm not sure anyone but AMD makes SMP-capible chipsets for Opteron.
> 
> The literature for the Via K8T890 claims that it supports up to 2 CPUs,

I have no idea why they make that statment.
A 2P K8T890 should look simular:

       |               |
       |HT[2]          |HT[2]
       |               | 
    |--+--|  cHT[0] |--+--|
    | BSP +---------+ AP  |
    |--+--|         |--+--|
       |               |
       |HT[1]          | HT[1]
       |               |
     /-+--\
     |VIA |
     |PCIe|
    |Tunnel|
    \---+--/
       |
       | VIA V-Link
       |
    /---------------\
    |VIA southbridge|
    \---------------/

Neither of the VIA I/O controllers should have any idea how many CPU's
are in the system.

> but I've only seen single-CPU boards based on it.  In reality, since the
> bridge between the northbridge and the CPU is HyperTransport, the
> support for SMP comes more from that motherboard maker than from the
> chipset maker.

s/more/100%/
 
-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)