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

[Lars Tunkrans]

David O'Brien wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 08:13:30PM -0600, Astrodog wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:14:14 +1100, Jan Mikkelsen
>><janm at transactionware.com> wrote:

>>
>>I'm not sure anyone but AMD makes SMP-capible chipsets for Opteron.
> 
> Note that the HP dual-processor workstation doesn't use the AMD chipset,
> yet is MP.  (Opteron's also aren't SMP, but are a NUMA architecture)
> 

NUMA is the opposite of UMA ( Uniform Memory Architecture)   not the opposite of SMP.
I see SMP as an oppsite of GRID-clusters like Beowulf.

These days a NUMA architecture is radically faster than a UMA architecture ( like INTEL PC's )
because the time to transfer data to/from RAM is 50 NS on an Opteron board compared to 90 NS
on an Pentium/frontside-bus  board. Anyone, 10 years ago, saying that NUMA is faster than UMA
would have been looked at as out of his mind.

   //Lars