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Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD 179

Posted by Hemos from the opening-up-the-big-guns dept.
vincecate writes "Traditionally the key chips that have allowed companies to scale multiprocessors to large numbers have been proprietary. Some examples are the Cray SeaStar, SGI NUMAlink, HP sx1000, and the IBM X3/Hurricane. This proprietary paradigm is about to change to a more open one. Two companies have developed key chips for building large Opteron multiprocessors, and they will be commercial off-the-shelf parts. PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster. The other company is Newisys, which will soon release the Horus chip. This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket (64-core) shared memory Opteron systems."
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Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD More

Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD

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  • it's about time (Score:5, Funny)

    by qwertphobia ( 825473 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:17AM (#13809316)
    It's about time! That z990 under my desk just isn't fast enough :-)

  • Expect to see.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 8127972 ( 73495 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:18AM (#13809324)
    .... an Alienware game system with this chipset by the end of the week.
    • Actually, I don't think it would help much. Most games now don't benefit from 2 way SMP, so the benefit from 64 way is debateable to say the least. Still for servers, this thing might help. I suspect that most server applications/os's will have servere scaleability problems once you go this far SMP though.

      BTW, Has anyone heard of the MLX1 [extremetech.com]. Makes you wonder what would happen if you put a bunch of these on a chip with some clever caching and the mother of all memory controllers. x86 Niagra [aceshardware.com] anyone.

      • Re:Expect to see.... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Peter La Casse ( 3992 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @01:23PM (#13810249)
        Actually, I don't think it would help much. Most games now don't benefit from 2 way SMP, so the benefit from 64 way is debateable to say the least.

        64 processors will let you run a lot more spyware before your frame rate is affected.

      • AMD and Intel have introduced multicore chips to the consumer market. It won't be too long now before there are millions of home computers with SMP class processing power. I suspect we'll start seeing games that take advantage of multiple processors by the end of next year. Whether they scale past 2 cores is an interesting question.
      • Actually, I don't think it would help much. Most games now don't benefit from 2 way SMP, so the benefit from 64 way is debateable to say the least. Still for servers, this thing might help. I suspect that most server applications/os's will have servere scaleability problems once you go this far SMP though.

        Fortunately all computing isn't about games. With this setup you'll be able to encode those DVD rips to DIVX in seconds instead of hours!

  • Do not count out Sun (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Give it another few months and I'm sure Sun will have some server with an obscene number of opterons in it, if thier current direction is any indication ....

    -GenTimJS
    • But the Sun solution is a proprietary solution. This article is specifically about chips that will allow NON-proprietary solutions that Dell or ASUS or ABIT might be able to build new super servers with. And as another poster already pointed out, SUN already has large Opteron servers. Hopefully this will allow these types of servers to become cheaper and more common, encouraging more software to be written to support them.
      • The Sun Opterons will run Linux, thats not proprietary. The hardwre implementations of such multi-processor are proprietary unless they are use PCI-X as the backplane to interconnect the processors, memory and peripherals.
        • Quoth twiddlingbits:

          The Sun Opterons will run Linux, thats not proprietary.

          TFA is about hardware, not software. What OS Sun runs on their servers is irrelevant to this discussion.

          Quoth twiddlingbits yet again:

          The hardwre implementations of such multi-processor are proprietary unless they are use PCI-X as the backplane to interconnect the processors, memory and peripherals.

          I don't think that you understood the word 'proprietary' in this context. Sun's technology, as well as (IBM's, SGI's, Cray's

      • Except the fact that most Opteron based Sun machines were designed by Newisys.

        Look at these pictures:
        Sun V40z [sun.com]
        Newisys 4300 [newisys.com]

        Newisys was one of the first places to design Opteron based systems.

    • If I were a betting man, I'd give you my trousers.

  • Imagine a... nah, too easy. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:21AM (#13809354)
    Cheap shots about Gentoo and Doom 3 aside, this is cool to see. I imagine it warms the heart of a lot of us old AMD fanboys. Plus, with a bit of luck the extra volume will bring down the prices of the Athlon 64s we stick in our gaming boxen. Right?... Right?

    ... k, maybe not. Can't afford one anyway :-(

  • Clusters vs. single servers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:26AM (#13809382) Homepage
    SeaStar and InfiniPath (and don't forget the XD1) are great for building non-cache-coherent clusters, but those are mostly useful for running specially-written scientific applications.

    Horus is used for building Opteron ccNUMA machines with one OS instance that can run any Linux or Windows apps. It's a very different solution for a different market.
    • yeah, not really sure what the writer was thinking. One can cluster boards built with *any* processor out there. Can even mix and match.

      Hasn't Beowulf been out there long enough for people to understand this?
      • Well, unlike most cluster interconnects InfiniPath is special in that it connect directly to the HyperTransport interface on the Opterons, without going via PCI(-e|-X). So it won't work on e.g. a Xeon.

        But yeah, from a user perspective Infinipath is just like any other cluster interconnect. Perhaps a bit lower latency, but nothing dramatic (as in order(s) of magnitude lower latency).

  • Links (Score:4, Informative)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:28AM (#13809403) Journal
    Just wanted to point out that the link to Newisys is just a blurb stating that AMD is releasing the Horus chip, and doesn't really have anything to do with Newisys, other than the fact that a couple of the people behind the AMD Horus release used to work there.

    Oh, and the Horus link is a PDF whitepaper... please warn when a link points to a PDF.

    • Re:Links (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:31AM (#13809434) Homepage
      No, Horus is developed by Newisys, but the people who initiated it have moved on from Newisys to AMD.
      • So why does the link say that the Horus is an AMD product? Is AMD just distributing a Newisys product?
        • Because Le Inq got it wrong, or at least used confusing wording. Given the incestuous relationship between Newisys and AMD, this isn't surprising, and in fact referring to it as an "AMD product" isn't 100% off the mark... But the .pdf (and history) make it clear that it is a Newisys product.
    • Oh, and the Horus link is a PDF whitepaper... please warn when a link points to a PDF.

      Why? You can set up your browser to handle a pdf link any way you like (if it bothers you that much, you can redirect yourself to a google html conversion of it).

  • god damnit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:29AM (#13809414) Homepage
    You kids, with your ultrasparc risc processing synchronous hypermultithreading vax/vms redbox pbx mumbo jumbo and your Ska music. For Christ's sake, cut the cotton-pickin' bullshit and tell me which stocks to buy and which to short. Oh and that AMD "capturing" the retail market tip the other day? Thanks for costing me six thousand dollars, my wallet was too thick and giving me a bad back. Christ.

    • Re:god damnit (Score:3, Funny)

      by mikael ( 484 )
      In my day, we used to toggle the OS and each program in bit by bit, remembering each opcode from memory. A keyboard was a musical instrument, a mouse was a type of vermin, and a terminal was where you attached the grounding wire of a lightning rod.

      • Re:god damnit (Score:3, Funny)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )
        You had lightning rods? We just told the tallest person... "Go stand in that there field!" when a storm came! And we LIKED it that way!

  • Is 32 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 )
    really a 'large number'?

    • Re:Is 32 (Score:5, Funny)

      by nganju ( 821034 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @12:05PM (#13809678)

      For this context, 32 is plenty large. Large is relative. If you ask me how many grains of rice I ate last night, 100 would be a small number. If you ask the average slashdotter how many women he's dated, 1 is a huge number.

    • 32 is a large number for SMP CPU heads, but it gets bigger. Consider that in roughly the
      same timeframe that retail chassis are available using these chipsets, quadcore CPUs
      will be on the market. That puts 128 modern CPUs in one box. Rare indeed is the whitebox
      application that needs to scale beyond that. And if you cluster *those*, you're rapidly
      approaching the top end of existing systems for HPC throughput.
  • PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster.

    This is news? We've been using an Infiniband-connected Opteron cluster for almost a year now. I got bids from half a dozen companies willing to sell us one. This is old, established tech.

    • Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)

      by joib ( 70841 )
      The special thing about InfiniPath is that the adapter is not a PCI-(e|X) card but rather connects directly to the HyperTransport interface on the cpu (requiring a special MB with a "HTX" connector), giving slighlty lower latency than a normal IB adapter.
      • This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket (64-core) shared memory Opteron systems.

        hypertransport or pci-e|X or whatever connection you may have my friend. 32 cpu's running at 1800mhz or more are so hard to synchronize that imho this whole "megayhpe" is much talk about much nothin. yeah 32 cpu's might be a good idea, but the only occasion you really want a smp machine is to use software that uses shared memory and shared i/o access ... but 32 cpu's begin to beat eachother down so hard that you barel
  • Operton is still proprietary, isn't it?

  • threat to big iron (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @12:21PM (#13809779)
    A 32-way SMP dual-core opteron box is a serious threat to Sun Enterprise boxes with 64 to 128 UltraSparc, even the hardware partitioning doesn't mean as much when you can just use two or more x86-64 boxes at probably less than half the price. For that matter, it also attacks HP's "superdome" Itanium2 servers and some of IBM's Power5 and Power6. The closed architectures and the proprietary Unix(tm) they run are in deep doo-doo
    • With AMDs commitment to support the Xen hypermanager calls in their next chips, the partitioning advantage that Sun has will be drifting away, soon.
      • Uh, Sun's domain based partitioning and Xen/ESX have very little in common and are actually addressing two different problems. They are not replacements for each other, and can actually be complimentary if you combine them.

        In the world of server and process consolidation, there are 4 or so 'levels'. Sun's partitioning addresses 1 of these levels. Xen/ESX/UML addresses another. (Note that the cost per hosted OS/Application goes down as you go down the levels. )

        At the top level, you have things like Sun's har
    • It takes a lot more than some core logic chips to build a big server, and takes more than a big server to acquire any market share. Look at the industry. Sun still dominates the Unix server market with expensive machines full of slow processors. Mainframes are still a billion dollar business.

      While I'm excited to see the possibility, you're not going to get anyone to spend this much money on a 64-way opteron box until they have been on the market for years, have been tested, and tried, and have lots of softw
      • All these comparisons to Sun are pretty funny, considering that Sun sells Opteron machines, and their previous generation of Opteron systems were designed by Newisys. Those Newisys guys clearly have solid experience designing around the Opteron. I don't think it will take long before platforms built around Horus prove themselves worthwhile, and probably Sun and other AMD builders will adopt it en masse.

        Since Sun is already in the Opteron camp, none of this news hurts them. With the cheapness of x86 hardware
    • A 32-way SMP dual-core opteron box is a serious threat to Sun Enterprise boxes with 64 to 128 UltraSparc, even the hardware partitioning doesn't mean as much when you can just use two or more x86-64 boxes at probably less than half the price.

      Would you buy that from Mom or Pop?

      A Sun Enterprise system is a system that is supported by the vendor for its OS (Solaris) and the hardware as well as other players, as the other systems you mention.

      A 32-way SMP dual-core opteron box is just a figment of your imaginati
    • also attacks HP's "superdome" Itanium2 servers and some of IBM's Power5 and Power6. The closed architectures and the proprietary Unix(tm) they run are in deep doo-doo

      Both the HP superdome and most IBM Power systems run Linux too.

      The value of the "big-iron" unix systems is not really in their CPUs, it is in their chipsets, which Horus does compete with, but also redundancy features like ECC and chipkill, redundant power systems, etc. Once you start adding all the equivalent featurues to a horus-based opter

  • Strange use of "open" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xoboots ( 683791 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @12:34PM (#13809868) Journal
    Proprietary is proprietary. AMD chips are no more "open" than any other vendor's chips.

  • Open Processors (Score:3, Informative)

    by Feneric ( 765069 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @12:48PM (#13809974) Homepage

    Umm, I know there's this odd phenomenon where many people tend to label any processor that's made by either Intel or AMD "non-proprietary" and any processor made by another company "proprietary", but even still this article is a little silly. SPARC processors have been in use since the late '80s, most people consider SPARC-based machines "Big Iron", and the SPARC processor architecture is fully open -- anyone who wants to can make SPARC processors. SPARCproductDIRectory [sparcprodu...ectory.com] lists a bunch of companies who currently do. In fact, there are probably just as many (if not more) SPARC manufacturers as there are X86 manufacturers.

  • This just in: Mac users say 64 core Opteron server will be almost as fast as the new Mac G5.

  • Great AMD is quit is doing fine. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JollyFinn ( 267972 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @02:13PM (#13810664)
    So where I can buy the AMD server with near full redundancy?
    Or the server which can run highly debugged application written in mainframe assembler in 60's or 70's ?
    Or atleast AMD computer with SINGLE memoryspace atleast 1TB in size?
    And also how many decades of uptime is for the operating system which is used with the new AMD computer?
    The horus is more or less getting close to midrange server in number of processor while it won't bring it to the reliability requirements of midrange server, to get that it would have to run its own memory controllers instead of cheap ass opteron controllers which lack for example hotswappable memory.
    Sure you get speed, but after taking the speed there is eventually a crash.
    The big iron is all about gettin continuing to function no matter what comes.
    Only problems outside of box, like earthquake or something similar could bring it down.

    Yeah. AMD is doing just fine...
    Its eating the cheap ass market, not the big iron.
    The price is cheap and its bought where the crash proof means better than windows which is like saying saying its unsinkable since it does better in open seas than normal rowboat used in lakes.

    Lets put it this way. x86 is just used in low end boxes and in clusters of lowend boxes. And those things are not for everything. They can do much but not everything. They are cost effective when you compare only the purchase price. But not so cost effective when downtime costs a lot.

    There is probably order of magnitude or TWO orders of magnitude of what joe slashdotter thinks big iron and what businesses have in big iron as in price range.
    • I wanted to add one thing.
      I'm having cheap ass Athlon 64 computer under my desk at home.
      And I think its great, but its still a very low end computer.
      And I think linux is a lot better than windows, and use it but its still no where near the mainframe OSes.
      Yes the mainframes have linux as one of their guest os. Running on top of a real os, but thats another story.
    • So where I can buy the AMD server with near full redundancy?

      You don't, you buy two.

      Or atleast AMD computer with SINGLE memoryspace atleast 1TB in size?

      Two thoughts on this. 1. It's really, really expensive. 2. The mainframe assembler from the 60's or 70's is 24-bit or 31-bit addressing at most, 1TB or RAM won't help you.

      Only problems outside of box, like earthquake or something similar could bring it down.

      Now you put the second one 1000km away.

      BTW - I've replaced IBM mainframes with clusters of 4-way Opte

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