INTEL QUAD CORE

Clovertown

February 14, 2007

The Clovertown chips will be my next major machine build. Possibly the Penryn, but most probably the Clovertown. I plan on building a couple of dual Clovertown machines that will fold for my team at www.2cpu.com. In my testing I expect to realize a significant efficiency gain over the dual Xeon boxes I now have. Reducing the number of boxes and yet still maintaining the same or possibly more "cores" I will build a system that will both out fold my previous systems and yet cost less to run.

My entire objective is to "fold" as much as possible. Since folding loads the processor at 100% 24 hours 7 days this will be much harder on the system than most people ever run into. I will be comparing my present system of 3.2 Xeons with the new system. At the present time I have 8 Xeon folders here and they are eating a lot of electricity. I am hoping to prove that a dual processor Clovertown system (8 cores) should use less wattage than 4 of my present systems yet turn out more work.

I am presently weighing whether to use a 64 bit Linux which would use the SMP folding program, or use Windows. I will be doing more research to determine which system would turn out the most work. I BELIEVE I read somewhere that the SMP folding program, only available to linux at this time, is more efficient than the 32 bit program I am now running on Windows XP. I will investigate this and document what I find out here.

Links to Clovertown info   CAUTION... I will list all reviews that add info to this. It doesn't mean I agree with them. I just want to list every resource I can.

Hooz@2cpu                                                    PIN modding LGA CPU's

Legit Reviews The V8

Legit Review on Folding with the V8

UPDATE 7/19/2007

Well the Clovertown idea is probably out. I just saw an article on the new Penryn low voltage processors that looks to be my best bet. More speed, more efficiency, at about the same cost. Then I stumbled across this motherboard by Supermicro and am really excited about it.

UPDATE 10/22/07

I emailed Supermicro a couple of times. No response. So they are out. I hate companies that ignore emails. Especially companies that are selling computer parts. That is the reason I swore off Iwill motherboards. I rewrote one of their manuals and sent many emails and never got one response. Now of course they are gone. Doesn't bother me much. hehe

I also tried to get Intel to send me some of the Penryn's. I got some response from them but I am still in the layers of beauracracy there. haha. In any case I just ordered a dual quad core system that we will test and configure here.

The system I will be testing is the Dell PowerEdge SC1430 server. Click here for QuadV8.