Computex 2005 Day 1 - ATI R520 Sighting, NVIDIA's new Chipset

iWill - Purely Servers

iWill's booth was particularly interesting; the company has been re-inventing themselves as a strictly server manufacturer.

iWill was one of the first to introduce a 8-socket Opteron server:

Their first solution featured two 4-socket motherboards basically layered on top of one another. The problem with this solution was that performing maintanence on any components on the lower motherboard required a pretty time-intensive removal of the top motherboard.

iWill's second try at an 8-socket Opteron server implements a much more intelligent setup:

Instead of placing two motherboards on top of one another, iWill's prototype features two boards on the same plane. One board features all of the PCI-X and PCI Express slots, while the other board is home to four HTX Pro connectors.

The HTX Pro interface is one actually defined by iWill and uses Hyper Transport to connect two-socket cards to the motherboard.

The beauty of this approach is that processor boards can be added/removed independently of one another. If AMD should introduce a DDR2 interface for future Opterons, all you need are new processor boards, and you can upgrade your current server to support the new CPUs.

iWill also showcased their new SFF, the ZMAXd2:

The beauty of the ZMAXd2 is that it features two PCI Express x16 slots and two Socket-940 CPU sockets, truly making for a powerful SFF. The SFF uses the nForce4 SLI chipset, so you can actually run two single-slot NVIDIA GPUs in SLI mode.

Like iWill's previous dual CPU SFF, the ZMAXd2 only features two memory slots off of one of the Opteron sockets - thus, the other Opteron must communicate over the Hyper Transport links connecting the two CPUs to gain access to main memory. Obviously, this solution is a bit higher latency than a conventional 2-socket system, but in order to improve performance a bit, iWill uses two HT links to connect the two Opteron CPUs together.

From what we can tell, the ZMAXd2 is an extremely powerful, yet very compact 2-socket Opteron system. With the introduction of AMD's dual core Opterons, you could potentially have a 4-core SLI system in a SFF case, which is pretty exciting.

Final Words

We still have tons of meetings left in the day, so it's back to the grind for us. There's much more coming, so stay tuned.