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Motherboards


Up to now several vendors went to the market with their vision of Intel Nehalem-based Superworkstation motherboards, but still none may be called the real one.

Some bandwidth calculations first:
- NVidia graphics cards processor-to-card throughput is limited by GPU internal PCIe to processor bus bridge to no more than 1.15 GB/s of raw data (but even this bandwidth may not be fully utilized by nVidia graphics cards - only in GPGPU mode nVidia cards may use it at full speed). Though AMD is using a PCIe interface, it's theoretical bandwidth is limited to PCIe x8 v1.1 (2GB/s). In reality AMD cards are also using less than 1GB/s in graphics mode and no more than 1.2 GB/s in GPGPU mode.
It is also should be noted that modern AMD graphics cards really use PCIe x8 bus for processor-to-card interconnect (though may downgrade to nVidia x16 "Graphics" PCIe). So, the AMD-only oriented Superworkstation may be quite cheaper than the one, supporting both vendors.
- In SLI/CrossFireX mode graphics cards nearly do not use PCIe interface for processor to secondary cards interaction, though for the unbridged CrossFireX, AMD uses the PCIe link for cards interconnect.
This means that even in independent mode Nehalem-based system may support up to 12 GPU/GPGPU cards.

- Best modern SAS 6G RAID controllers now may use no more than 3.5GB/s of raw bandwidth in reading (no more than 2,5GB/s in writing), so up to three (even four sometimes) RAID cards may be supported by one PCIe v.2.0 x16 link.

In my mind. the ideal graphics workstation motherboard should:
- be as fast as possible
- support as many as possible GPU/GPGPU cards (QPI throughput allows up to 12 independent cards, but not all processor/chipset combinations will support so many)
- support up to 12GB/s software RAID over hardware RAID array (up to 6 (or even more) fully-loaded RAID cards (or on-board chips)
- support 2-3 additional PCIe x8, 2-3 PCIe x4 and 2-3 PCIe x1 cards (total number of additional PCIe slots should be about 4-8)
- support 2-3 PCI-X/PCI expansion cards (still no PCI-e alternatives in apme applications)
- have enough commonly used expansion connections on-board, namely:
      - 2-4 1GB LAN ports
      - 2-4 real (not Marwell pseudo 6G) SATA 6G ports (possibly in the form of on-board SAS/SATA 6G RAID controller (up to hardware RAID 10E) with 4-8 internal ports)
      - 4-8 SATA II ports, 2-3 eSATA II ports
      - 2-4 USB 3.0 ports, 6-8 USB 2.0 ports, 6-8 USB 1.1 ports (or a couple of USB hubs on USB 2.0 ports / 6-8 additional USB 2.0 ports)
      - 2-3 IEEE 1394a ports, 2-3 IEEE 1394b ports
      - high quality on-board 7.1 Audio (with all front/rear/internal connections aupported)
- not mandatory, but highly desirable:
      - 1-3 auto-configurable 40GB-InfiniBand /10GB-LAN ports
      - one common IDE and a couple of hot-swap IDE-through-USB or IDE-through-SATA ports
- optional (if the board may also be used as a claster nod):
      - 1-2 COM ports
      - possibly one FDD port
      - support for IPMI 2.0 with KVM-over-LAN and virtual media over LAN
      - VGA port

So, the ideal workstation motherboard should have ultimate processing power combined with the ultimate connectivity.
So, here is my vision of the Nehalem architecture-based superworkstations:

LGA 1156 Superworkstation motherboard
Uni-processor LGA 1366 Superworkstation motherboard (Single northbridge version)
Uni-processor LGA 1366 Superworkstation motherboard (Dual northbridge version)
Dual-processor LGA 1366 Superworkstation motherboard
Dual-processor LGA 1587 Superworkstation motherboard