AMD Opteron 2356 Quad-Core "Barcelona"
AMD Opteron 2300 processors support Same Socket Technology, which means that existing Socket F (1207) motherboards with Opteron 2200 "Santa Rosa" processors can be upgraded to using these quad-core parts. For older Socket F motherboards, a BIOS flash is required. While these older motherboards are compatible with the 2300 series, even with a BIOS flash they will not be able to support the split power plane design with Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM) and suffer as a result.
The motherboard we are using for our AMD Opteron 2356 testing is the Tyan Thunder n3600M (S2932WG2NR-E). This motherboard will be reviewed shortly at Phoronix and it features the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 Chipset with LSI 1068E SAS ASIC, dual CPU sockets, and 16 DDR2 memory sockets. This motherboard boasts dual PCI Express x16 slots with PCI-E x8 bandwidth. Tyan offers a variety of different motherboards that are compatible with AMD Barcelona processors. Many of them use the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 Chipset while also present are some deploying the Broadcom HT 1000/2000 Chipsets. In total, Tyan is currently selling 19 AMD Socket F motherboards, so whatever workstation or server features you're looking for, chances are Tyan has a motherboard to suit your needs.
The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 Chipset supports both single and multiple CPU configurations, compatible with Scalable Link Interface (SLI) for Quadro GPUs, SATA 2.0 with RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, high definition audio, USB 2.0, and an assortment of other features. The NVIDIA nForce Professional 3000 series comes with official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3/4, Novell SuSE Professional and Enterprise Edition, and Fedora. The RAID modes supported by the Professional 3600 Chipset are 0, 1, 0+1, and 5. With an nForce Professional 3600 and 3050 combination on a single motherboard, there are twice the number of PCI Express lanes and links (56 PCI-E lanes and 12 links). These NVIDIA workstation chipsets also support IMPI 2.0 / ASF 2.0 remote management.