IWill: Dual Opteron SLI Small Form Factor PC
The DPMax2 is IWill's latest small form factor invention. It actually supports two AMD Opteron processors - which can be dual core parts - two NVIDIA graphics card in SLI mode (6800 GT maximum), dual channel DDR400 memory, and dual hard drives (with RAID if desired). Don't expect it to be under $1,000 with all that hardware, of course!
The firm also showed off the concept for its next generation 8-way Opteron server. The current 8U systems (Tyan today announced one, too) are based on two processor boards. However, maintenance turns out to be extremely difficult, as the upper processor board needs to be removed for any maintenance work necessary at the lower level. Thus, in the future, IWill plans to use a base board plus four CPU boards with two 940 pin sockets.
IWill's next big news is a HyperTransport to Infiniband adapter. This device was developed by a company called PathScale, and allows for low-latency linking of computer cluster nodes at a very affordable price point. While $3,000 per port interfaces are pretty common these days, the company claims it will be able to hit $1,000 pretty soon.
That is the common way of building eight way Opteron machines: two boards with four CPU sockets each, linked together.
The next generations will likely be based on this design.
