[Pc_Support] eWeek attempts to dissect Sun Fire X2100, 4100 and 4200 ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Sometimes it just sickens me to read Ziff-Davis articles: 
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT042405213553
 

  "The X4100's chip sets come with AMD's HyperTransport
   memory bus links that have been bumped up to 1GHz."

Note "HyperTransport memory bus links."  HyperTransport is
not a memory bus, it's a system interconnect for CPUs and I/O
in Opteron.  And there is _no_ "memory bus" in Opteron, it's
direct, glueless, trace-for-trace 2 x 184-pin DDR channels.

  "The X4100 is a 1U (1.75-inch) single- or dual-socket
   system armed with the AMD-8000 Series chip set."

This additional commentary and confusion is on the use of the
AMD8000 ICs.  It actually appears the new X series are nForce
PCIe, and Ziff-Davis is too ignorant to detail it.

Anand found the X2100 is a nForce4, with a NIC attached to
one (1) PCIe x1 channel (in addition to the chipset).  SATA
is standard, from the nForce4 itself.  There is a PCIe x8
slot for forthcoming/early-generation storage/network
controllers that are PCIe x1, x4 or x8.

>From what I've seen, the X4100 and X4200 seem to be nForce
Pro 2200 and 2200+2050, respectively -- with the X4100 having
one (1) AMD813x added and the X4200 having two (2) AMD813x's
added (not sure if its the AMD8131 or AMD8132).  This is what
really gets to me about Ziff-Davis, these types of omissions.
 Given the processor, memory, slot and peripheral
specifications, these are safe assumptions -- especially at
the price-point.

I'm personally interested in what SAS controller is being
used, and if it offers hardware RAID-0, 1, 1e and/or 10
natively.  Would not surprise me if it's the LSI ASIC, which
does have that in hardware, and LSI Logic has specialized in
Solaris support in the past.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                | Sent from Yahoo Mail
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org     |  (please excuse any
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ |   missing headers)