NVIDIA nForce Professional Announced

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, January 24, 2005, 10:26 AM EDT

Good morning folks. We've got some interesting news this morning, by way of NVIDIA. They have just announced their new nForce Professional MCPs that bring PCI Express, SLI, and a few other new technologies to AMD's Opteron platform. Dave and I spent some time talking with NVIDIA about the nForce Professional, and its various implementations, last week and we both came away impressed. Here's a snip from the official PR...

NVIDIA Enters Server and Workstation Segments with New PCI-Express Core-Logic Solutions

NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs First PCI-Express Core-Logic for AMD Opteron Processor-Based Workstation and Server Computing Environments

SANTA CLARA, CA - JANUARY 24, 2005 - Following the successful introduction of its line of PCI-Express products in the consumer desktop PC market, NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors, today introduced NVIDIA nForce Professional media and communications processors (MCPs), the industry's only PCI-Express core-logic solutions for AMD Opteron processor-based server and workstation platforms.

Designed for cost-effective server and workstation environments—including blade servers, computing farms, computer-aided design (CAD), digital content creation (DCC), and visualization platforms—the NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs are the first and only solutions to offer support for PCI-Express and other advanced technology solutions, including integrated client-based security features, TCP/IP offload, fault tolerant storage designs, and optimizations for NVIDIA Quadro^(R) workstation graphics solutions, including multi-display and NVIDIA^(R) scalable link interface (SLI) environments.

"The NVIDIA nForce Professional platform offers an unmatched feature set for server customers in a wide variety of business computing environments," said Phil Hester, CEO of Newisys.

"NVIDIA has long demonstrated its success in platform design, and the new feature-rich NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs continue that tradition," said Marty Seyer, corporate vice president and general manager, Microprocessor Business Unit, AMD's Computation Products Group. "The combination of our AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture and NVIDIA nForce Professional provides the performance, scalability, and features to handle today's most demanding professional graphic accelerators as well as server I/O cards in both 32-bit and 64-bit computing environments."

The NVIDIA nForce Professional MCP family, which today includes the NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 and the 2050 MCP, an I/O companion chip, offers a host of technological capabilities that make it an ideal platform for industrial-level computing, including:

•_Scalable, innovative, single-chip architecture that takes advantage of the AMD Opteron processor's Direct Connect Architecture

•_Full support for PCI-Express, with up to 80 lanes using a single 2200 MCP and multiple 2050 MCPs, Advanced Error Reporting (AER), hot-plug, Message Signal Interrupts (MSI), and other server-specific requirements

•_Native Gigabit Ethernet with TCP/IP hardware offload for enhanced networking and data processing (up to 4Gb/sec. of bandwidth total)

•_Native support for next-generation SATA 3Gb/s hard drives (up to 16 SATA drives total)
Complete suite of RAID functionality, including RAID 5

•_Microsoft Windows and Linux support

•_NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture for simplified IT management and overall lower cost of ownership

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"We are pleased that NVIDIA is launching the first PCI Express product for AMD Opteron platforms. IBM and NVIDIA have a long relationship in workstation graphics and we expect that the NVIDIA nForce Professional products will have the same high quality and reliability as the NVIDIA Quadro products," said Bob Lenard, Worldwide Director of IBM IntelliStation Workstations and Linux clusters. READ MORE...

Tags: Nvidia, nforce, force, professional, pro, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com