Introduction
On the AMD side, the workstation and server platforms have always been fairly slow to advance. An example is the venerable Athlon MP platform, the 760MPX. With endorsements by HP, IBM and Sun, the Opteron is turning heads in the IT world. The Opteron has fared a little better with the AMD-8111 to the 8151 chipsets but the changes have been largely incremental - the 8131 added PCI-X, the 8132 PCI-X 2.0, and the 8151 AGP 3.0. Feature integration is a problem as SATA is still provided through an external chip and driver support under Linux is lacking as we have found out recently. Nonetheless this is understandable as with enterprise level hardware, IT managers tend to balk at unproven, wholesale changes.
NVIDIA has been no stranger to the workstation side of the market with their Quadro line up. I remember the days when people scoffed at the notion that the Quadro could compete with the likes of the Number 9 and 3DLab's Wildcat. The Quadro was way cheaper and it was from a young upstart and apparently there was no way it could compete with the so-called real workstation cards. Well taking a look at the workstation market today and it looks like it is dominated by the likes of the NVIDIA's Quadro and ATI's FireGL lineup. Today NVIDIA is announcing an extension to their nForce lineup again aimed at the lucrative workstation and server side of the market with the nForce Professional.
NVIDIA is touting the nForce Professional as the first PCI Express (not PCI-X) board for the server / workstation side of things on AMD's side, a major jump from the traditional PCI bus found on the 8000 series chipset from AMD. One thing we mentioned is the general reluctance of IT managers to avoid big changes to hardware because of the usual problems associated with immature drivers and hardware. NVIDIA feels that they have the advantage in this department because the nForce platform is pretty mature and this is especially true in the driver department with their Unified Driver Architecture.
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