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ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/21/2003 | 05:53 PM ]

Closer Look: NVIDIA nForce3 Professional Chipset

Only the announcement of the NVIDIA nForce3 Professional core logic helped uniprocessor systems based on AMD Opteron processor to come into the market. AMD-8000 chipset offered by the company as a solution for the Opteron CPU, is not used in uniprocessor systems for some reason. And the launch of NVIDIA nForce3 Professional, which is targeted exactly at uniprocessor workstations, pushed mainboard guys to start releasing their solutions for Opteron 1XX processor family.

Besides, Opteron based systems owe NVIDIA nForce3 Professional the possibility to use AGP slot for high-performance graphics subsystem. As a result, we got an excellent platform for high-performance graphics workstations based on 8th generation AMD processors.

As a chipset developer, NVIDIA decided to support AMD processors long time ago and has already made good progress. Of course, the company couldn’t miss out the so long-awaited Opteron processors. Moreover, NVIDIA is also very much interested in bigger sales of the graphics workstations, because this company also offers Quadro graphics accelerator family positioned for this particular market. As a result, they rolled out nForce3 Professional chipset, which has every chance to become a perfect basis for the graphics workstations as well as for home systems of computer enthusiasts.

Having applied all the experienced the company acquired when working on the nForce2, NVIDIA managed to implement a bunch of new cool solutions in their nForce3 Professional. First of all, I would like to point out that NVIDIA nForce3 Professional is a single-chip core logic set. Since Opteron features its own memory controller, nForce3 doesn’t have any. As a result, the chipset North Bridge became very simple: the dual-channel memory controller with the DASP, which they used in nForce2 was no longer needed.

Besides, the integrated graphics core also disappeared from the chipset North Bridge, because this component is absolutely unnecessary in the graphics workstations market. As a result, this nForce3 North Bridge contains only one AGP 8x controller and HyperTransport bus controller, and thus occupies very little on-die space. This fact, as well as the innovative 0.15micron production technology used for nForce3 Professional manufacturing allowed NVIDIA to fit the South Bridge onto the same die with the North Bridge. Compared with the South Bridge of nForce2, the South Bridge of nForce3 Professional boasts a few new functions. Note that integrating both chipset Bridges onto a single die allows reducing the latencies during the work of input/output devices with the CPU and the memory. In this case, when the memory controller is integrated into the CPU, removing the bus between the chipset bridges means the system gets rid of a serious bottleneck. You will feel the difference when working with a network and various external devices.