NVIDIA Launches nForce Pro Chipset For Opteron

This week the company unveiled its latest, the nForce Pro chipset for Opteron, and it looks to stir the pot even more vigorously than anything to come before. First and foremost, nForce Pro brings PCI Express (PCI-E) to the “Hammer” platform. AMD has stated it will not add PCI-E to the existing AMD-8000 series currently used in a variety of Opteron motherboards, and this follows AMD’s prior tradition of the “Irongate” chipsets for the Athlon XP/MP platform: AMD seeds the market and lets third-party solutions step in once the basics are covered. As might be expected, the PCI-E implementation will fully support nVidia’s Scaleable Link Interface (SLI), which allows users to run two video cards driving a single display for nearly twice the performance.

But nVidia isn’t aiming this chipset at enthusiasts so much as it’s aiming it at the high-end workstation and server market. Why do we say that? Because nForce Pro sports bandwidth–big, heaping gobs of it that would only be seen in a server running multiple RAID arrays, SAN adapters, and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Indeed, nVidia has gone so far as to provide a hardware implementation of the TCP/IP stack in the chipset, allowing those processing duties to be offloaded; such features are typically only found in extremely high-end equipment. Onboard RAID is also included, and can span both SATA and PATA disks.

…All this bandwidth and functionality puts AMD in a rather curious position, though. On the one hand, AMD has all the right stuff: HyperTransport, 64-bit extensions, “No eXecute” bit protection, on-die memory controller, and speed to beat the best dual- and quad-CPU Xeon setups from Intel. But when most companies think of high-end servers, they think Sun, IBM, or Intel, not AMD. I can only imagine how frustrating this is for Hector Ruiz, since his company obviously has a superior product at a superior price but is being outsold by Intel.

One can only hope AMD finds some way to shed its undeserved “cheap” image, and is finally recognized as a major player in the high-end computing market.

nVidia launches nForce Pro chipset for Opteron
Geek.com