Let's see, doing a bit of back of the napkin math here, the ATI Radeon 5970 comes in at 5 teraFLOPS by itself and this motherboard could presumably hold seven of them if by chance you could find a way to power and cool all those watts.
Without factoring in the pitiful gigaFLOPS those puny CPUs put out, having 35 teraFLOPS at your disposal would put you at position 161 on the TOP500 list.
I think I need to go take a cold shower now...Reply
The evil twist is that you can't use the every-day/normal Core i7 chips on this, Intel thought of that and prevents them from working on multi-socket boards; you need to buy the very expensive multi-socket Xeon chips.Reply
Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. It's been awhile since I explored really in-depth new motherboard tech, so if I'm remedial feel free to tell me, but am I reading this right? This thing's got room for two i7s? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I'm used to motherboards having a bunch of expansion slots (you know, from when motherboards didn't come with video cards onboard). But multiple CPUs impresses me.
Add to that the 12 (twelve?!) DDR3 slots and I'm drooling.
Note: According to the article, it says that the i7 does not actually support SMP, so you couldn't just toss a couple of them in there, so that is disappointing. Still, though. This beast seems very expansion-friendly.
@OCEntertainment: Ever opened a Mac Pro? Looks alot like this inside. And there are other i7 Xeon boards that use 2 chips already by Tyan and Supermicro. So this isn't THAT crazy really. Nice PCI Slot config though.Reply
@OCEntertainment: Servers and high end graphics workstations are dual socket boards, from what i read about the board it uses LGA 1366 sequence 5500 Xeons.
I really really want this board to be released soon, i have 6000 set aside for a new dual socket Xeon workstation to finish my thesis. Its the only dual socket 5500 xeon board that has SLI, there are a few boards with multiple PCI Express 16 slots, but they are the for CUDA workstations HPC stuff not graphics.Reply
@H2H: The part that is crazy about this boad is the GPU controller on the board. Multi-CPU boards have been arond for a while as have 12 slots of RAM. Few, however, have had this many GPU slots and I don't think any had the ability to crossfire or SLi or to hybrid crossfire and sli. It's an impessive board. I couldn't imagine having two of the forthcoming 12 core Gulftown CPUs in it, 24GB of tri-channel DDR3 RAM, and a GPU in each slot.Reply
@Nathan Obbards: Its slightly different, but its just more PCIe slots with probably the same number of lanes. Yes, now that I read the article, actually using all the slots breaks it from 16x down to 8x per slot. PCIe slots are useful for things other than graphics cards though, too. The Intel Skulltrail offered a smaller but similar configuration and ran SLI/Crossfire with 4 PCIe 16x slots.Reply
@H2H: Yeah, I imagine this thing with some RAID controllers in the PCI-E slots or a flash drive in the PCI-E slot. There's a lot you can do with it, it's just impressive the amount that they've fit in the board and the power load it will carry.Reply
While impressive from an engineering point of view (and a sheer "how badass can we get?" POV), the fact that they needed to use liquid helium to run the cpu at 7 GHz is more proof that we're heading for a massively multicore future - at least until another set of materials to replace silicon and aluminium gets in widespread use and which can run faster without getting hotter. I think we'll see 80-core x86 chips first, though.
And daqman - I can sympathize! I worked in a plasma physics lab in college, and we used a lot of liquid nitrogen and helium both, and while liquid nitrogen was fun (a colleague froze a slug at one point, and I took a thermos back to a party to pour into a punch-bowl, etc), the liquid helium was tough to work with. Not to mention time-consuming, since filling a dewar meant a *massive* amount of super-cold "fog" coming out of that flexible metal pipe from the big tank, and then air was always freezing onto the rim of the dewar (and I got some pink skin a few times, but never actual frostbite, doh!)Reply
@Ninety-9: True - and I'm not saying we'll *never* see 7 GHz speeds in consumer CPUs. But my high-end notebook in 2004 had a 1.8 GHz CPU, and in 2009, high-end notebooks still are in the 2.0 - 2.5 GHz range. Five years later. So we're not seeing the dramatic increases in clock-speeds we did from the 90 MHz chips up to the 2 GHz ones (that's a 22-fold increase in 10 years, vs maybe 20% increase over the next five years). Desktop CPUs have followed similar trends (drastic increase in clock speeds from 1995 - 2005, then modest speed bumps, with proliferating cores).
So unless there's a materials-science breakthrough, I doubt we'll see 7 GHz before 2015, if then (more likely we'll see 16-core and 32-core CPUs then instead). #amd7ghzReply
There was a shot of someone pushing a transfer line into a helium dewar with a glove on one hand and the other glove held in his teeth. I remember back in the summer of nineteen ahem, cough that long ago, when I was the only person in Liverpool treated for frostbite. I was doing the same thing with a transfer line when a jet of helium gas at minus bloody cold degrees centifroid hit me across the knuckles. It was funny at first to see frost on the skin. Half an hour later it was red and stinging. An hour later the blisters were forming. Then off to occupational health to try to persuade them it was frostbite in June. It was a lot of fun though... great story to tell the kids. #amd7ghzReply
@Software_Goddess: I've been solidly in the AMD camp for many, many years myself. I've never been anti-Intel, but I always appreciated lower-cost alternatives who tried harder to innovate. I even used to build my own systems with Cyrix processors, back in the day. #amd7ghzReply
Except they ban for memes like that now, so Giz doesn't really "like their cheesy jokes and memes" after seeing the same thing a million times. #amd7ghzReply
That's too bad because although I have an Athlon system at home, I still have to update my mobo to accept DDR2. And now that the Athlon is the SUV of CPUs as far as power consumption, I think I'll have to move over to Core or i7.Reply
i have been toying with building a new rig and this gives me hope at doing it cheaply. i think my parents want a box they can put next to the tv as well. now do i have to overclock it to get good performance?Reply
@Nick: No you dont i have the CPU that is a step below this one(see my post below) in a HTPC and it preforms great with no overclocking. And you can get a whole system up and going with a really nice videocard for about $500.Reply
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