AMD Shanghai Hits Stores

[btarunr]

"Shanghai" is the codename for the soon to be released quad-core enterprise processors by AMD, under the Quad-Core Opteron brand. It was expected of the company, to come up with these processors around this time of the year, and they have. AMD hasn't officially announced these processors yet, but the processors have made for early listings in some popular online stores. PC Connection and Buy.com have made listings of some of the upcoming SKUs. The Opteron 837x, 838x series are anything but cheap. These are processors that support multi-socket setups up to eight sockets. The Opteron 238x series processors are the dual-socket supportive variant of the same processors.


From the listings, the pricing of these processors looks like:

AMD Opteron 83xx series:

• Opteron 8380 (2.50 GHz) - $1,768
• Opteron 8382 (2.60 GHz) - $2,177
• Opteron 8378 (2.40 GHz) - $1,360

AMD Opteron 23xx series:

• Opteron 2380 (2.50 GHz) - $814
• Opteron 2382 (2.60 GHz) - $1,019

According to industrial sources, AMD is expected to officially announce the chips on 13th of November. The company looks to be very optimistic about the market-reception of these processors, as enterprise processors have become a flagship product for the company.

Source: CNET

[ASharp]

Great! Now where's Deneb?

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by ASharp

Great! Now where's Deneb?

It will be in for Xmas.

[HighEndToys]

The hell with Deneb, get me two of those 2382s for my *cough* workstation.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/163...ive/index.html

[btarunr]

Those are Barcelona chips they've used in the WS.

[HighEndToys]

I know, it is my workstation and I think it is time for an upgrade!

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by HighEndToys

I know, it is my workstation and I think it is time for an upgrade!

If you can pull through till Q2 '09, you can have a 2.8 GHz part for the price of that 2382. Good to have you here Chris.

[suraswami]

Originally Posted by btarunr

It will be in for Xmas.

Woo Hoo, so I should wait? Will it be in AM2+ flavor? Which boards will support it? any guess?

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by suraswami

Woo Hoo, so I should wait? Will it be in AM2+ flavor? Which boards will support it? any guess?

Yes, AM2+ parts are Phenom X4 20350 (2.80 GHz) and Phenom X4 20550 (3.00 GHz). AM3 parts come in 2009. Board support is all up to the manufacturers. Any AM2/AM2+ board should support it, though mobo vendors look to carve SKUs out of existing crap brandishing "45nm CPU support". Remember what ASUS did with 140W CPU support. They carved out new SKUs out of most AMD 7-series boards, just with "140W CPU support".

Originally Posted by btarunr

If you can pull through till Q2 '09, you can have a 2.8 GHz part for the price of that 2382. Good to have you here Chris.

Who's Chris ?

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by wolf2009

Who's Chris ?

Chris Ram, the reviewer for Tweaktown (unless I got it wrong). The other TT staff that are also TPU members, I know so far is Lars Nilsson aka TheLostSwede, and Navin Maini the news guy. He's done news for TPU too.

Originally Posted by btarunr

Chris Ram, the reviewer for Tweaktown (unless I got it wrong). The other TT staff that are also TPU members, I know so far is Lars Nilsson aka TheLostSwede.

Cool, its nice to have them here !

[HighEndToys]

Yep, it is me, I run hang around here from time to time. TPU is a chill place and there aren't a lot of know it all 15 year olds running around dropping their unimformed knowledge to the masses.

Originally Posted by HighEndToys

Yep, it is me, I run hang around here from time to time. TPU is a chill place and there aren't a lot of know it all 15 year olds running around dropping their unimformed knowledge to the masses.

Cool, welcome !

Anyways, I suppose these processors in a multi socket motherboard will be Video Editor and Encoder's dream ?

How many sockets do the motherboards have ?

What else would one do with such a multi socket beast ?

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by wolf2009

Anyways, I suppose these processors in a multi socket motherboard will be Video Editor and Encoder's dream ?

If your encoders can pass through those many available CPUs, then yes.

Originally Posted by wolf2009

How many sockets do the motherboards have ?

The max that s1207 platform can have is 8, or 2 depending on the processor. The Opteron 8xxx CPUs are expensive in being 8-socket supportive, since the eight sockets sort of daisy-chain system interfaces apart from the connection to the northbridge.



^For a Phenom X4. The first 1800 MHz is what connects the CPU crossbar to the northbridge. The other 200 MHz (400 MT/s) links you see, are rudimentary in a Phenom X4 or Opteron 2xxx. In Opteron Shanghai 8xxx, they are used to form daisy-chains with neighbouring sockets.

Originally Posted by wolf2009

What else would one do with such a multi socket beast ?

Err...run a server?

[HighEndToys]

The 8-Series chips, the ones that start with 8 can be used in 4 and 8 way socket systems. The 2-Series are for dual socket systems.

2 sockets means 8 cores. A 4 socket board (www.tyan.com) will have 16 cores!!! Expect to spent a pretty penny on that board.

Video editing, audio, content creation and the usual workstation stuff is where the majority of this stuff live but the 8 Series is generally found in high performance servers.

I use mine for testing consumer and enterprise hard drives. The main reason is because the nForce workstation chipsets like the 3500 are so stable and has a lot of PCIe options. Since I use one X16 slot for a video card, another for a SAS controller and another for a discrete SATA controller my options were fairly limited. Then again I have been using dual socket systems since the PIII days and just like the quality found in this level of products.

[HighEndToys]

You beat me too it.

[DaJMasta]

Originally Posted by HighEndToys

The hell with Deneb, get me two of those 2382s for my *cough* workstation.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/163...ive/index.html

Got 2 grand to drop on your workstation at the moment?


looks nice, but that price is far from it....

[HighEndToys]

After I get my Ducati 999R paid for

The price is right where you should expect it to be. These are the processors that compete with Xeons and where AMD makes their real money. I typically pick my Opterons up from 'other sources' though.

Originally Posted by btarunr

If your encoders can pass through those many available CPUs, then yes.


Err...run a server?

Well, x264 can take advantage of as many cores as possible, If I am correct .


I never understood the difference between a server server and a quad core PC Desktop behaving as a server.

Why does a server need so many cores ?

[Hayder_Master]

wow i like this Opteron 8382 (2.60 GHz) but price - $2,177 , i think it deserve it

[HighEndToys]

Originally Posted by wolf2009

I never understood the difference between a server server and a quad core PC Desktop behaving as a server.

Why does a server need so many cores ?

Because real servers, like web, file and database servers have extremely high I/O loads. Take for example a database server, you have thousands of little bits and pieces or data that are accessed randomly.

Web servers, many low dollar hosting places put thousands of website on one server.

File Servers are a lot like database servers but the data is larger and not as random.

PassMark has a good simulation of server and workstation loads. This is actually a hard drive test but it does scale well depending on the platform used.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/163...ive/index.html

The numbers are in MB/s.

One thing that we are going to see a lot of in the coming weeks is articles on virtualization. AMD is asking the sites that will recieve systems to write something up on virtualization.

This is where you have server acting as many. Imagine a 16 way server doing the work of 8 smaller servers. The cost of power is greatly reduced and for a medium sized company they can turn several servers into one. One server could run their website, intranet, file server, databases, DHCP, WINS, and the company Torrent traffic (you know your IT guy has one stashed away somewhere).

In gamers terms, if you could manage to hook up 1 computer to 8 monitors, keyboards and mice you could have a small LAN party in your living roon with one system. That really isn't possible now but the day is coming. Instead of you and 7 buddies trying to pull 50 amps out of the 20 amp socket you could use all 20 with one server that you all share.

[HighEndToys]

When the Opteron 880 came out I got my hand on two of them and broke the PCMark world record with them. It was turned into kind of a big deal by the guys at Noctua because I used their coolers in passive mode (no fans). Somehow they managed to get it on Yahoo News and just about every techsite on the planet. At the time no one had ever heard of Noctua and I had one of the first sets of coolers from them in the US.

[FreedomEclipse]

Originally Posted by wolf2009

What else would one do with such a multi socket beast ?

F@H?? i swear some of the scientists would parachute in to give you an honors since you jumpped from #60 - #1 (top of the F@H charts) in less then an hour.

[btarunr]

Originally Posted by FreedomEclipse

F@H?? i swear some of the scientists would parachute in to give you an honors since you jumpped from #60 - #1 (top of the F@H charts) in less then an hour.

You can accomplish something the scale of what 4x Opteron 8xxx achieve with F@H (SMP) using a single GeForce GTX 280 (CUDA).