Iwill reveals SFF server plans

WHILE DRAWING attention with its dual CPU SLI-ready small form factor PC, the ZMAXd2, Iwill's main focus is actually on the server market. In fact, the company wants to use its tried and tested dual-CPU SFF PC chassis as a small business server. Gary Lin, product marketing manager, says the company is looking at Fujitsu's 2.5-inch hard drive, and believes it could put as many as six inside an SFF case (allowing all kinds of RAID configurations), along with a slim optical drive. This version wouldn't have SLI, of course. Small companies don't want mostly-empty rackmount servers cluttering up their offices, but could accept a compact and attractive SFF system, Lin says.

These SFF servers are still on the drawing board, but at Computex in Taipei, Iwill was showing other interesting new server designs. The H8502 accepts up to four modular AMD CPU cards (2 CPUs per card), with 4 DIMM slots for memory on each card (up to 128GB supported). Obviously, this makes upgrading and swapping CPUs and memory easier. The H8502 will allow upgrading to DDR2, when AMD supports it.

See the Inquirer's earlier article for some more details and photos of the H8502, here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23518

The company even believes it will be possible to have DDR and DDR2 cards working side-by-side in the H8502. Lin notes that this would reduce bus speeds to the lowest common denominator, so would not advise doing it, except as an interim solution. The upright cards also improve the airflow through the system, compared to older servers with the CPUs mounted flat on the motherboard, according to Iwill. The H8502 is expected to be on the market in Q4.

Iwill is also showing a small footprint E-ATX format 4-way Intel Xeon server at Computex. Dubbed QMPS, this has a rather unusual double deck format, with the memory mounted on separate cards above the mainboard. The tunnel created between the two decks makes cooling simple - just blow air in one side and/or pull it out the other. But how does the memory talk to the rest of the 8500 chipset-based system? PCI-Express - Iwill says it provides more than enough bandwidth.

More details and a photograph of QMPS are at Iwill's website, here: http://www.iwill.com.tw/inews.asp?n_id=44