Saturday, November 20, 2004

Dual G5 2.4 GHz PCI Express nForce4 blade announced

Continuous Computing Corporation has announced a dual G5 blade server which uses Apple's U3H Northbridge (aka IBM CPC925) controller. This server is called the LINUXbladePPC20A.

The design supports dual G5 PowerPC 970FX 2.4 GHz CPUs, a 1 GHz HyperTransport bus, PCI Express, and up to 8 GB DDR400 ECC memory, all in a blade server form factor with a total maximum power utilization of under 200 Watts.

This represents the first G5 board available which supports the new PCI Express interface, and it uses the nVidia nForce4 chipset popular on the PC side. Apple does not yet support PCI Express, but one might suspect they will adopt it in 2005.

It's also nice to see that the cramped blade design can handle 970FX CPUs of up to 2.4 GHz. Apple has built 2.3 GHz Xserves for Virginia Tech, but they are a custom configuration not (yet) available to the general public, and they are used with specialized cooling equipment.

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