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.
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.
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
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.
The whole point of GPGPU is to not use CPUs to do work...
Use xp or vista installs from their website cd are lame until it works.
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.
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?