September 3, 2005

Overclocking: The AMD Dual Core 3800+ X2

The folks at legitreviews tested the AMD 3800+ X2 to see how well it overclocks, and whether the $360 chip, has the potential to become another a low priced chip that can offer enormous performance writes TechSpot. Test System:

* DFI Lan Party NF4 Ultra motherboard
* 1 GB Corsair XMS 3200XL memory
* ATI Radeon X850 XT video card
* Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB HDD
* Koolance Exos-2 (CPU, Chipset, Video Card, and HDD cooled

Shorthand Results

With an idle temperature of 31C, this chip was stable at the speed rating for a 4800+

Using standard cooling and simple overclocking techniques, the processor ended up coming in at 2.7Ghz, and outperformed the 4800+ (a $1000 chip)

August 14, 2005

Thunder K8QW (S4881)

Back in July, Tyan showed of the new Tyan 4/8-socket scalable high-end server/workstation platform - Thunder K8QW (S4881) . The design and implementation of the Thunder K8QW (S4881) offers the option to upgrade to four or eight-way processing capabilities.

Multiple features are included in the Thunder K8QW such as the following:

Supports up to four (4) AMD Opteron 800 Series Processors; both Single and Dual Core support
Optional upgrade to 8-way processing through use of HT4881 and M4881 add-on modules
Support for up to 32GB registered DDR400 memory (or 128GB registered DDR333/266)
Dual PCI Express x16 slots (one w/ x16 signal, one w/ x4 signal)
Three (3) PCI-X expansion slots (two 100MHz and one 133MHz)
Integrated Broadcom®-based dual gigabit ethernet ports and built-in ATI RAGE XL video
Onboard NVIDIA Serial ATA-II 3G RAID with levels 0, 1, and 0+1
Remote management and power management options
SSI MEB (16" x 13") form factor (for S4881 motherboard)

"By leveraging the AMD Opteron 800 series processor, and a Direct Connect Architecture, along with the power of Dual Core support, Tyan has been able to deliver not one, but TWO powerful solutions with a high degree of scalability," said Danny Hsu, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Tyan.

InfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapter

PathScale, is now shipping its InfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapter, the industry's lowest-latency Linux cluster interconnect for message passing (MPI) and TCP/IP applications. The University of California at Davis is an early InfiniPath customer and represents the very first AMD dual-core Opteron cluster deployed with PathScale InfiniPath.

The ultra-low latency and unprecedented messaging rate of the PathScale InfiniPath HTX Adapter greatly improves MPI application performance and Linux cluster utilization, enabling scientists, mathematicians and engineers to solve new problems with higher degrees of resolution than ever before. The highly pipelined, cut-thru design of InfiniPath is optimized for applications sensitive to communication latency, the most difficult problem to overcome when migrating from large SMP systems to clusters. InfiniPath delivers superior Interconnect performance at commodity price levels by implementing a high-performance software stack and connecting directly to the AMD Opteron processor via a standard HyperTransport HTX slot. When combined with low-latency InfiniBand switching from Cisco (TopSpin), Silverstorm (Infinicon) or Voltaire, InfiniPath enables applications to reliably scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes.

August 8, 2005

Acer Altos G5350

The Acer Altos G5350, is a new workgroup server with 64 Bit Processing technology. Features include Dual core processor support with Hypertransport technology, Flexible and modular design amd Comprehensive systems management and installation solutions. Redundancy features such as redundant power supplies and native RAID solutions are offered on the Acer Altos G5350. The Acer Altos G5350 also offers you the possibility to upgrade to enterprise server features such as redundant arrays of storage, in a flexible and affordable manner.

August 7, 2005

Alienware MJ-12 7550a Powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processor

Powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processors, Alienware MJ-12 7550a workstations deliver maximum performance, reliability, and stability on everything from 3D animation and architectural design to visual effects and post-production. With dual-core processing power, the MJ-12 7550a can dramatically increase your productivity by allowing you to run multiple applications at the same time.