MSI announces E7525 Master-S2 motherboard on Intel E7525
A new incarnation of Voodoo2: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 SLI concept
Galaxy introduces GLACIER 6800 graphics card on GF 6800 GPU
MB860: a Mini-ITX board for Efficeon
MSI announces E7525 Master-S2 motherboard on Intel E7525
Taiwanese Micro-Star International (MSI) announced E7525 Master-S2 workstation motherboard on Intel E7525 chipset for two Xeon processors. The novelty naturally enough features PCI-Express, supports DDR2 and Intel EM64T technology.
The board supports Intel Xeon processors with 800 MHz FSB and has 6 x memory sockets for up to 16GB DDR2-400 SDRAM (registered, ECC), 1 x PCI Express x16, Gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom 5721), dual-channel Ultra 320 SCSI (Adaptec 7902W), 2 x SATA (RAID 0, ICH5R Southbridge). Besides, it has 1 x PCI-X 64-bit/133MHz, 2 x PCI-X 64-bit/100MHz, and 2 x PCI slots.
A new incarnation of Voodoo2: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 SLI concept
You might remember Voodoo2 that enabled 3Dfx to lead the market for some brief period of time due to SLI (Scan Line Interleave) connection that coupled two cards together to double the total performance. According to Hardware Analysis, until now this idea wasn´t offered as a concept, because naturally there were no boards with two AGP slots.
But PCI-E seems to change this, because a number of Tumwater-based workstations will have two PCI-E x16 slots that would provide a base for testing. So, getting to the matter, today NVIDIA introduced a SLI concept on GeForce 6800.
While Voodoo2 SLI utilized a cable connection, NVIDIA utilizes SLI (Scalable Link Interface; or MIO) connector. It enables two cards to share the load using respective algorithms. Like one card handles upper half of the screen and another handles the lower half. (Voodoo2 SLI had cards interleave the image, so one card managed odd lines, while another managed even. But as there´s no official comments, we just have to state the original: "In essence the screen is divided in two parts; one graphics card renders the upper section and the second graphics card renders the lower section.") Most dynamic allocation is managed by a driver (yet unheard of).
No particular performance results were officially announced. But an undisclosed source said that GF 6800 tandem is 77% faster than a GF 6800 with unoptimized drivers. Meanwhile NVIDIA expects 90% performance boost.
I guess the demand for such a monster is a non-trivial matter. Just imagine yourself buying a dual PCI-E x16 board, then Xeon processors, then two identical PCI-E GeForce 6800 cards (and then optionally 4 monitors — to fully feel the power of tandem.)
Galaxy introduces GLACIER 6800 graphics card on GF 6800 GPU
Hong Kong Galaxy Technology launched shipments of its new NVIDIA GeForce 6800 based card.
The card features low-noise GLACIER cooling system, has 350MHz core, 2.2ns Hynix DDR SDRAM (700-900 MHz).
MB860: a Mini-ITX board for Efficeon
These days Taiwanese IBASE is to announce MB860 Mini-ITX motherboard for Transmeta Efficeon TM8600 processors. The novelty is positioned as barebone base.
1.2 GHz Efficeon TM8600 processor doesn´t require active cooling, has 1MB L2 cache and supports DDR400 memory. MB860 features ALi M1563M Southbridge and has ATI M7CSP-16 graphics (16MB allocated), 1 x SO-DIMM, 1 x PCI, 2 x USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, D-Sub and S-Video.
Source: Akiba PC
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