Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 10:22:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Essenz Consulting <john@essenz.com> Cc: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org>, hackers@freebsd.org, hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Intel 840 Chipset Discontinue Message-ID: <14713.42924.81417.759293@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <200007212154.OAA01169@mass.osd.bsdi.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10007211224450.66348-100000@athena.lightningone.net> <200007212154.OAA01169@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
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Mike Smith writes: > > I was told by several of my distributors that all motherboards based off > > of the Intel 840 chipset are being discontinued. That means the Supermicro > > PIIDM3 and PIIIDME, and any other 840 board. Hurray! ;-) > I have mixed feelings about this, but on the whole I think it's probably > for the best. I've had really patchy results with the i840, and > performance hasn't been impressive. While, on the other hand, I cannot say enough good things about the performance of our Dell PowerEdge 2400 & 4400 machines (both use RCC chipsets). What else can you say about machines that will serve NFS over via gig ether at over 70MB/sec and not break a sweat ;) > > Supermicro has two new boards, 370DL3 and 370DLE. Identical in specs to > > the 840 boards, but using some kind of "ServerWork LE" chipset. However, I > > have also been hearing bad news about these boards as well. > > We've had some issues with the RCC chipsets in Dell systems, yes. All of these are now resolved, aren't they? > > Has anyone worked with these boards? Supermicro SAYS that they work fine > > under Linux and Solaris. However, one of my distributors says thay they > > are extremely touchy when it comes to memory. Only Registered PC133 ECC > > memory will work. This memory requirement probably explains why they perform so well ;) The RCC chipsets, especially those which use interleaved memory like in the PE4400, have stunningly good I/O bandwidth for a PC. They have over 440MB/sec of I/O bandwidth to a 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus (I've actually measured it, yes). They run gig ether at 950Mb/sec with stock kernels and I've run protype Myrinet boards at over 2Gb/sec end-to-end with TCP using the zero-copy sockets framework that Ken Merry has been talking about. > > If someone at freebsd.org wants to seriously test these boards, let me > > know, and I'll donate one. Without the 840 boards, server configs are now > > back to the 440GX days! We've got a big purchase coming up & I'd love to get my hands on one of them for testing, but FreeBSD test labs should get priority. FWIW, I'm mainly an alpha port committer, but I'm the one who fixed the RCC peer bus probing issues when we got our Dell 2400 a few months back.. Anyway, we're looking to replace some of our cluster & would be looking for 16-24 nodes of them. We were originally planning to get Alpha DS10Ls, but the availability of RCC chipsets in a small form factor may change our minds as the RCC chipset is the only thing that can compete with the alpha's Tsunami chipset for I/O bandwidth. Do you know of anybody building 1U or 2U rackmount systems for a reasonable price ($2000/node or less) around these motherboards? It looks like most integrators are using the L44GX & its broken 32-bit 66MHz slot which runs at the wrong voltage (Myrinet claims they're violating the PCI spec). Cheers, Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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