Asus Supercomputer Motherboard Revealed
Asus finally launched the official product page for its upcoming P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard, built on two Nvidia nForce 200 chips and 7 PCIe slots.
Asus finally launched the official product page for its upcoming P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard, built on two Nvidia nForce 200 chips and 7 PCIe (Gen2 x16) slots. Mainly designed for CUDA parallel computing, the company said that users can shove four CUDA cards into the board (one of which should be a Quadro graphics card) to achieve nearly four teraflops of performance. Additionally, for consumers wanting tons of power on the gaming front, the new motherboard not only offers Nvidia GeForce 3-way SLI support, but also provides support for ATI's CrossFireX technology.
According to the specs, the motherboard is compatible with Intel's Core i7, i7 Extreme, and Xeon processors utilizing Intel's X58 + ICH10R chipset. The board also offers a system bus of up to 6400 MT/s, and six DIMM slots for a maximum of 24 GB of DDR3 memory using a triple channel memory architecture. On the storage front, the P6T7 provides six SATA (3 Gb/s) ports, two eSATA (RAID 0,1), and two SAS ports (RAID 0,1). For consumers who have loads of USB devices, the motherboard even comes packed with 12 USB 2.0 ports.
Asus also revealed several company-specific features supplied on the motherboard including a true 16+2 phase power design, support for CrashFree BIOS 3, EZ Flash 2, a CPU parameter recall, and a stepless frequency selection. For the workstation, the package contains a bundled diagnosis card for system checking, Asus' SASsaby card support, a diagnostics LED that checks key components during the boot process, and the Asus Heartbeat, LEDs that supposedly shine around the ASUS brand name after a successful booting process.
"The ASUS Workstation Series is the ideal foundation for a powerful PC," the company states on the product page. "It delivers awesome power, dependable performance and unparalleled multiple I/O scalability for the most demanding tasks and future upgrades. Also, it provide extreme power saving experience with EPU-6 Engine function. The ASUS Workstation Series intelligently reduces operation noise and dissipates heat through advanced and environmentally friendly methods to accommodate user needs."
As of this writing, the motherboard is not available on the market, however the company should release an official announcement soon regarding its availability and pricetag.
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No dual CPU sockets? It does not seem very super to me.
Go read up about CUDA. You will probably get it then.
Go read up about CUDA. You will probably get it then.
Everyone will use some sort of "CUDA", so CUDA itself is no game changing since all others will support as well. Think time is better spent looking at cost/performance and other features.
no super ML caps. what a shame.
Everyone will use some sort of "CUDA", so CUDA itself is no game changing since all others will support as well. Think time is better spent looking at cost/performance and other features.
I was just explaining why this thing is "super" and doesnt have dual sockets.
Is it wrong to get aroused by looking at that board?
Better put this thing in a deep freezer when it is running.
3 way sli x16 seems pretty super and 7 pcie x16 slots lol the board is crowded as shit either way.
But it's super because you shove 12gigs in it and 4 nvidia quarto cards and then you got some serious gpgpu power in there and one hell of an electric bill
Everyone will use some sort of "CUDA", so CUDA itself is no game changing since all others will support as well. Think time is better spent looking at cost/performance and other features.
Yup, all the other companies are going for OpenCL, Nvidia just wanted to pretend they had something special by rushing their closed format out the door.
This product is a unique product attempting to market as a gimmick.
With an nforce 200 chipset, I can finally install that rotisserie feature in my tower and have a roast fully cooked in under an hour.
I wonder how long it will take to get driver support for a quad x2 video card set-up?
This thing would be much more powerful with a set of AMD cards in it.
I am wondering when asus will support my p5n-d board with windows 7 drivers. My cd will not work on 7.. I cant find anything.. is it too early??
I was just explaining why this thing is "super" and doesnt have dual sockets.
The whole point of GPGPU is to not use CPUs to do work...
screw CUDA, ill put 7, 48 core larrabees in it!
Hey why aren't the comments in the same areas as their authors (not separated by that little line)? This 'style' as it were is more confuss-ed.
I am wondering when asus will support my p5n-d board with windows 7 drivers. My cd will not work on 7.. I cant find anything.. is it too early??
Use xp or vista installs from their website cd are lame until it works.
i thought that with the new technology like OpenCL and Cloud Computing, PCs would be replaced by server racks.
I swear I'll kill a baby kitten the next time I hear someone talk about clouds and computers like its remotely new or novel just because a new name got tagged to it.
OK...maybe not...but I'll deny it treats for 3 days!
In any case, a few people nailed it. The point of this rig is to put as much GPU power on a single board as possible (within reason) to use as a "super workstation".
Niche? Sure, but the idea's solid either way for the very few apps out there that will currently take full advantage of it.
I always thought mainboards could use more PCIe slots...
If you need several video cards and some 8x PCIe SAS RAID controllers, this one can do the job.
Having just one CPU socket is not fine with me, after all it's Intel's Core i7, and up to 24GB. Do you really need twice that?
I meant "Having just one CPU socket is fine with me"...
I know, i should have checked twice... knowing there's no EDIT button...
Hmm .. 7x 4850 and some custom drivers to make em work in 7xcf - then I'm sure even the fastest desktop cpu would need a water chiller to satiate the cards ... and probably you'd need a peltier built into the psu to avoid it overheating too!
On a more serious note - I wonder why they didn't just add 5 pcie slots (4 for graphics 1 for raid) and made room for another cpu socket.
And they are going to charge how much for this board? $500-$600?
I can find better things to put my money into.
Isn't 4 teraflops acheivable with 2 of the 4870x2's?
I am not an Electrical/Computer Engineer, but if scaling seems to be the path of the uber-workstation, and SLI/Crossfire is a viable solution anywhere in the computing world, why not have scalable motherboards in a folding double-sided server style BTX motherboard/chasse configuration? Alternate PCI slots, with a motherboard-SLI connection. The rig would be relitively easy to service,and the airflow would be unidirectional.
I am not an Electrical/Computer Engineer, but if scaling seems to be the path of the uber-workstation, and SLI/Crossfire is a viable solution anywhere in the computing world, why not have scalable motherboards in a folding double-sided server style BTX motherboard/chasse configuration? Alternate PCI slots, with a motherboard-SLI connection. The rig would be relitively easy to service,and the airflow would be unidirectional.
you know, i wish i thought about that. for a workstation in an environment suitable, that is a fantastic idea. Asus? MSI?
Ask ibm to make it. They're already making water cooled servers, and I bet you'd need watercooling for such a big heater.
can i do 3-way SLI and 3-way Crossfire simultaneously with this board?
I'd like to see a block diagram of this beast.
7 x16 PCIe cards are wonderful and all but lets do the bandwidth math.
There the best X58 chipset port breakdown scenario is officially 4 ports @ x8 worth of lanes available.
Plus another port at x4 lanes, then and two ports at 1 lanes, that's 7 total possible ports.
Which tells me that all they likely did was take the 4 x8 and add the nforce switches to them simply to allow SLI support (that the board already had since nVidia caved, but nVidia insists is somehow "better" to have these useless switches than not having them, which electrically makes no sense.)
And then pop x16 slots onto x4 and x1 electrical links.
Big deal, maybe there is some BIOS magic in there to make certain card combinations easier, but since PCIe is an auto-negotiating you can do the same thing at home with a dremel tool.
You can add all the switches and ports you want but you are still limited to 42 lanes of PCIe, in very specific configurations.
Even if all 7 slots are somehow electrically x16 lanes through the use of those n200s you are still shoving all that bandwidth through two at least x16s at the Northbridge (think Skulltrail).
Not all that compelling.
This thing is a waste of silicon to begin with and certain to be overpriced one at that.
Also, the biggest reason for no dual socket is that this isn't a board for server cpus, you would want, again, Skulltrail for that, or any server motherboard that suits your budget.
Multiple CPUs are server processors only.
Even Skulltrail just used a rebranded Server chipset and Xeon CPUs... that's why it used FB-DIMMs.
3 4870x2's and a 4890 in a case with 8 expansion slots would be sick on this. Of course, you need a small fusion reactor to power it all, but thats like 8.6 teraflops. Now imagine 7 single slot watercooled 4870x2s. Then you talking 16.8 teraflops, of course at this point we are pretty much talking about government funding only.