NVIDIA starts shipping nForce Professional 3000 Series

NVIDIA announced new additions to the Company's family of NVIDIA nForce Professional core-logic solutions designed to offer enterprise customers a high-performance, scalable platform solution for professional servers and workstations. To date, NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs have been selected to power a variety of server and workstation platforms from leading companies such as HP, IBM, Sun, Fujitsu-Siemens, and others, helping NVIDIA to achieve phenomenal market success over the last two years. Today's announcement of the Company's NVIDIA nForce Professional 3000 series—already shipping to NVIDIA enterprise customers—helps solidify the Company's position in the professional computing space and will help NVIDIA customers to develop and design cutting-edge blade servers, computing farms, computer-aided design (CAD), digital content creation (DCC), and advanced visualization platforms.

Designed as a scalable platform solution for AMD Opteron-based servers and workstations, including next-generation Opteron processors with support for DDR2 memory, the new series of NVIDIA nForce Professional 3000 MCPs include:

The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 MCP: Engineered for the enterprise with advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability features, 1P to 8P+ servers based on the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 platform lower total cost of ownership through sophisticated power management techniques and simplified driver management. The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 MCP integrates a feature-rich architecture with support for PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA 3Gb/sec., and legacy I/O on a single chip. The high-performance Gigabit Ethernet with TCP/IP acceleration supports demanding server environments with load balancing and fail over capability, and extensive support for key Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3050 MCP for additional scalability and I/O: NVIDIA nForce Professional 3000 Series MCPs integrate an advanced PCI Express architecture that can be configured to support the latest PCI Express cards. Each MCP includes 28 PCI Express lanes that can be mapped to 6 controllers in a number of different ways. This gives the system designer the flexibility to support x16, x8, x4 and x1 PCI Express links in the platform. In addition, the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 and 3050 chips can be combined to scale to 56 or more PCI Express lanes for systems with industry leading I/O connectivity. The NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs also support Virtual Channels (VC) on all the PCI Express links, thus providing guaranteed bandwidth and latency for time-sensitive traffic.

The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3400 MCP: Designed specifically for high-performance, 1P servers and workstations, the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3400 MCP features support for NVIDIA SLI multi-graphics technology, advanced networking capabilities, outstanding PCI Express performance, and support for up to six SATA 3Gb/sec. hard drives.