On Computex Taipei 2009, AMD is showing not just its current Santa Rosa platform, but also the upcoming Opteron 6000 series, the Maranello platform.
By some chance, we haven't heard much about the Fiorano platform, AMD's first server/workstation chipset scheduled to debut later this month – but AMD is gladly talking about and showing the upcoming Maranello platform.
As we disclosed before, Maranello is consisted out of two to eight Socket G34s, packing anywhere between 24 and 96 processing cores. The top-end 8S configuration will feature 96 processing cores, up to 384GB of DDR3-1333 and offer up to 341.2 GB/s of system memory bandwidth.
AMD Maranello pictured - Inventec targets servers, while Quanta decided to build motherboard for the workstation segment.
These numbers are absolutely staggering, but the dual-socket, entry-level server and workstation platform isn't anything to be sneezed at. AMD showed two motherboards from Inventec and Quanta. Inventec went for the memory jugular, creating a 1U-friendly motherboard with 24 DIMMs, supporting an octo-channel, 576-bit memory controller [each Magny-Cours processor comes with quad-channel, e.g. 288-bit memory controller].
Long story short, this motherboard will take up to 96GB of DDR3-1333 ECC memory, offering bandwidth up to 85.3GB/s. Quanta's motherboard is oriented towards high-end workstations, as it packs two PCIe x16 and a single PCIe x8, x4, x1 slot. Also present is one PCI slot, probably just for debugging or legacy purposes.
However, dual-GPU configurations on this design won't be an easy thing to do, since one PCIe x16 slot has eight DIMMs in front, meaning you can only deploy a shorter graphics card. We would advise Quanta to move PCIe x16 slots down the order, by simply putting the x4 on top, followed by one x16 and then x8, x16, x1. In that case, dual Quadro FX or FirePro setup is just a formality.
In case you didn't know, both Intel's and AMD's processors have a memory controller with 72-bit channel [64-bit data plus 8-bit correction/parity, e.g. when we write about 128-bit, 256-bit etc memory controllers, media mostly omits those additional 8-bit]. In case you wondered, AMD's Socket G34 consists out of 1974 lines, as this is a Lane Grid Array. In Intel's terms, this Socket could be named LGA-1974.
Editor's Note
You might wonder where these pictures are coming from. The story was originally published on SemiAccurate, a new publication brought by one of my former colleagues. The chinese site Impai "borrowed" those pictures, slapped their logos on'em and treated them like theirs, hence the multilinking to other sites. We do not condone these policies, thus, we're publishing the pictures with the link to the original story.
