Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Motherboard (continued)
The K85AE Extender card is the workhorse of the K85AE subsystem. The heavy disk IO, AGP and additional PCI-X interfaces all converge on the expansion card. You can see an image of the extender card below, and once again, those interested in a reverse side high resolution scan can download that here.
Click to enlarge.
| Sun K85AE Extender Card Specifications | |
| AGP Tunnel | AMD 8151 |
| PCI Tunnel | AMD 8131 |
| SCSI Controller | Adaptec AIC 7902W |
| PCI Slots | (3) 100MHz PCI-X |
| AGP Slots | (1) 8X AGP |
| SCSI Ports | (2) 68-pin u320 |
You will notice that the second 8131 PCI-X tunnel does not require a heatsink on the extender card. There is no CPU mezzanine covering this chip, so it probably stays cool enough on its own without additional passive cooling. We are excited to see multiple 8131 tunnels on this Sun workstation. Several four- and eight-way setups utilize multiple 8131 tunnels as well (usually one for every two processors). When we see that Sun starts to implement dual core Opterons in their workstations and servers, machines like the w2100z won't be as affected by IO bottlenecks - but we will have to wait a few months before putting that theory to test.
The Adaptec AIC 7902W is a tried and true dual channel SCSI adaptor. A dual channel adaptor may be a bit of overkill on this workstation, since we can only use two hard drives, but we are sure that there are some professional applications for such hardware out there somewhere.
Oddly, the AGP 8X slot is labeled as an AGP Pro adaptor. This is obviously not the case as can be seen in the image - we just have a plain, old AGP 8X adaptor. Looking at the traces, the expansion board and AMD 8151 AGP tunnel are both certainly capable of AGP Pro cards. Fortunately, AGP Pro compatibility is fairly insignificant as AGP Pro has fallen way to AGP 8X cards with additional power molexes on board.
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mino - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
#5 I would, putting aside the fact I could not afford one. :(Even despite I'm running Tyan Tiger MP on Fedora C2 ;)
meatless - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Maybe it was just done for some sort of comparison baseline, but who would actually use RedHat 9 on a brand new dual Opteron workstation?jbond04 - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Hey Kris, great job on the review. I wanted to let you know that I was pleasantly surprised by your thermal graphs for the inside of the case. I think they're a great idea; and I've never seen them before anywhere else. Keep up the good work.-Scott
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I notice that this system is nearly identical to the IBM Intellistation that just arrived on my test bench today. Even the motherboard is identical, as well as the case(exterier looks a bit different, but interier is the same).Makes me wonder if Sun and IBM are actually building these, or outsourcing them to a third party and sticking thier label on them
phaxmohdem - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Just when I was complaining of no top teir dual opteron workstations. It's a shame that the way I'd like it configured costs 18,000 bones. Guess it will just be a pipe dream for a while more. God help our wallets when they release the w4100z Quad opteron workstation ;)Denial - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I like to give one a test drive myself, but I'll let others be the guinea pigs.madeira - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
good nightWhere can I find the BIOS (donwload) to update,
The oracle - no longer provides soporte.
I need physical BIOS or software update
Could you help me please!