Inside ATI & NVIDIA: How they make frames fly

More Servers

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We showed a picture of these linux boxes (above) about a year ago when they were all running Celeron processors, today they have all been upgraded to Pentium IIIs and provide the best balance of performance and power consumption possible using today's hardware. Remember that one of the things that must be taken into account when running this many systems constantly is that power usage needs to be managed carefully.

You may remember Racksaver from our recent Athlon MP server roundup, but we were surprised to see them in NVIDIA's server farm as well:

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The 1U units are all outfitted with two motherboards per server and they can be configured with either 2 or 4 CPUs. NVIDIA's CPU of choice was Intel's Pentium 4 although the servers are offered with Athlon MP and Pentium III processors as well. We found it interesting that NVIDIA hadn't adopted any Athlon MP platforms in their server setup, a testament to AMD's poor success in the enterprise market with the Athlon MP, an area Opteron hopes to improve in; judging from NVIDIA's excitement about Opteron we can see it eclipsing the Athlon MP in the enterprise world quite easily.

A close-up of the Racksaver racks

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There are a total of 2,800 CPUs running in these Racksaver racks; the performance density offered by this 2-system/1U solution is incredible, which is why NVIDIA likes these things so much.