1) Are we ever going to see non-uITX boards with Xeon-D? I can't be the only one interested in low power but aren't constrained by physical space and would rather have expandability.
2) How does a low power E3 compare to the Xeon-D? I know CPU TDP can get close, but I'm thinking about the platform as a whole. Xeon-D seems more integrated and designed for low power. I don't know how E3 would do at lower load levels.
While they certainly could build a bigger board, the whole point on this type of chip is low profile, low power, high core density servers which means 1U. Because you could only lay down at most two expansion PCIe boards sideways in a chassis, that limits the expansion right off the bat.
According to the SOC block diagram, they have 8 PCIe v2 lanes available, and 24 PCIe v3 lanes available which seems to leave a lot of potential on the table. However, with a bigger chassis (2u-4u), you have more thermal capacity which means you can step up to the bigger (or multiple) Xeons.
What would be interesting is a small workstation type computer taking advantage of the cores and some dual graphics cards. It could be done with the same ITX board with a special riser without expanding the board though.
You can fit two PCIe cards in 1U very easily, though you do need risers to do so. It's impractical to do using any ATX-based form factor though, because of all the stuff on the board itself, unless you use PCIe extension cables of course, shich may well be an option if you PSUs are small enough.
The reason why an mATX version would be nice would be for storage nodes, where a single HBA may not be sufficient, and the chassis is a bigger 2-4U affair
And that's almost exactly my use case. Having physical space and ability to dissipate heat and doesn't mean I have a desire to dissipate heat (paying for it twice).
The box won't be pure storage, so more grunt than Atom-class is pretty strongly desired. Hence Xeon-D looking nice on paper as a CPU/SoC, but no one making a board I want with it.
And I fully understand that's the biggest market, but there are niche boards for all sorts of things. A SOHO storage/virtualization all-in-one isn't that unusual.
This is my use case. I'm trying to rebuild the cobbled-together home virtual host I use as a lab environment with a new case with a hot-swappable RAID10 backplane; currently I'm using a USB3 external array, which actually does the job pretty well but has no way of notifying the OS when a drive fails.
Been eyeing the spec sheet for that board for more than six months. I've yet to see it available for purchase anywhere, or even a price for it, which I suspect may scare me off. I'm disappointed that Xeon-D was "launched" back in March of last year, and that piece of vaporware is the closest thing I've seen to something beyond mITX. If I don't have space constraints, give me access to all those PCIe lanes available.
the "vaporware" feel of Xeon-D is mostly because the big cloud companies (think Google and AWS) are gobbling up all the supply. Quite annoying I feel, but that's how the market is now....
For 2016 I need to add a SAS adapter and RDMA nic for Storage Direct testing. So need two slots. This easily can be done in 1U short depth rackmount. No reason to go 2U because the storage will be jbod.
I wonder what kind of price range we might be looking at. Supermicro is running about $800+ for the 1541 8 core with similar specs. Of course, they're the only game in town at the moment if you want this type of setup, hopefully competition will bring the price down somewhat.
I'd love to drop one of these in my webserver support server running a bunch of VMs and drives. Right now I have a Xeon X3450 and it's pretty efficient, but this would be a whole new level of power savings.
As long as AMD is basically absent from the market, Intel will charge top dollars for their soc's driving up the pricing of the whole platform. Let's hope that AMD could come up with quad-ddr4 ZEN with 6-12 cores with remotely competitive perf/w / frequency / IPC combination.
I'm a bit sad this list isn't showing the rumoured 12- and 16-core Xeon D devices.
(I have returned my Xeon-D system for a refund and bought an i7-5820K with the money - for the kind of things I do I am not power-constrained and six fast cores are better than eight slow ones)
The lack of DPDK support for Cortina CS4227 nullifies this board's usefulness for highspeed network routing applications, but moderate-speed (~3gbit) and fileserver tasks will probably fit happily.
Scratch that - the Cortina CS4227 is the PHY chip, the MAC is contained in the Xeon D SoC itself, where all the packet magic happens. The Xeon-D 1541 contains an X552-class MAC, which is compatible with dpdk's 'igb' driver.
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icrf - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Two questions:1) Are we ever going to see non-uITX boards with Xeon-D? I can't be the only one interested in low power but aren't constrained by physical space and would rather have expandability.
2) How does a low power E3 compare to the Xeon-D? I know CPU TDP can get close, but I'm thinking about the platform as a whole. Xeon-D seems more integrated and designed for low power. I don't know how E3 would do at lower load levels.
bill.rookard - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
While they certainly could build a bigger board, the whole point on this type of chip is low profile, low power, high core density servers which means 1U. Because you could only lay down at most two expansion PCIe boards sideways in a chassis, that limits the expansion right off the bat.According to the SOC block diagram, they have 8 PCIe v2 lanes available, and 24 PCIe v3 lanes available which seems to leave a lot of potential on the table. However, with a bigger chassis (2u-4u), you have more thermal capacity which means you can step up to the bigger (or multiple) Xeons.
What would be interesting is a small workstation type computer taking advantage of the cores and some dual graphics cards. It could be done with the same ITX board with a special riser without expanding the board though.
ZeDestructor - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
You can fit two PCIe cards in 1U very easily, though you do need risers to do so. It's impractical to do using any ATX-based form factor though, because of all the stuff on the board itself, unless you use PCIe extension cables of course, shich may well be an option if you PSUs are small enough.ZeDestructor - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
The reason why an mATX version would be nice would be for storage nodes, where a single HBA may not be sufficient, and the chassis is a bigger 2-4U affairicrf - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
And that's almost exactly my use case. Having physical space and ability to dissipate heat and doesn't mean I have a desire to dissipate heat (paying for it twice).The box won't be pure storage, so more grunt than Atom-class is pretty strongly desired. Hence Xeon-D looking nice on paper as a CPU/SoC, but no one making a board I want with it.
icrf - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
And I fully understand that's the biggest market, but there are niche boards for all sorts of things. A SOHO storage/virtualization all-in-one isn't that unusual.starkruzr - Sunday, February 14, 2016 - link
This is my use case. I'm trying to rebuild the cobbled-together home virtual host I use as a lab environment with a new case with a hot-swappable RAID10 backplane; currently I'm using a USB3 external array, which actually does the job pretty well but has no way of notifying the OS when a drive fails.ZeDestructor - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9754/asrock-rack-lau... right here :)icrf - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Been eyeing the spec sheet for that board for more than six months. I've yet to see it available for purchase anywhere, or even a price for it, which I suspect may scare me off. I'm disappointed that Xeon-D was "launched" back in March of last year, and that piece of vaporware is the closest thing I've seen to something beyond mITX. If I don't have space constraints, give me access to all those PCIe lanes available.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
the "vaporware" feel of Xeon-D is mostly because the big cloud companies (think Google and AWS) are gobbling up all the supply. Quite annoying I feel, but that's how the market is now....Dug - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
I agree with needing a bit more.For 2016 I need to add a SAS adapter and RDMA nic for Storage Direct testing. So need two slots.
This easily can be done in 1U short depth rackmount.
No reason to go 2U because the storage will be jbod.
bill.rookard - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
I wonder what kind of price range we might be looking at. Supermicro is running about $800+ for the 1541 8 core with similar specs. Of course, they're the only game in town at the moment if you want this type of setup, hopefully competition will bring the price down somewhat.I'd love to drop one of these in my webserver support server running a bunch of VMs and drives. Right now I have a Xeon X3450 and it's pretty efficient, but this would be a whole new level of power savings.
zepi - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
As long as AMD is basically absent from the market, Intel will charge top dollars for their soc's driving up the pricing of the whole platform. Let's hope that AMD could come up with quad-ddr4 ZEN with 6-12 cores with remotely competitive perf/w / frequency / IPC combination.10101010 - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Street price is around $1000-$1100 for the dual 1G Ethernet model.ZeDestructor - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
For those wondering, the CS4227 is just the SFP+ PHY. The controller/MAC is still Intel-based, with the PHY-controller link one over 10GBASE-KR.nils_ - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
I was wondering about that. I think I've seen boards that actually use an Intel 10G chip instead of the SoC...ZeDestructor - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
Many list it as an Intel X552 (which is what you'll see in device manager/lspci).DanNeely - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Does using SATA DOM offer any advantages over SATA M.2, or is it just a legacy interface that's stuck around in the enterprise for some reason?ZeDestructor - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Mostly legacy that stuck around from enterprise never bothering with mSATATom Womack - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
I'm a bit sad this list isn't showing the rumoured 12- and 16-core Xeon D devices.(I have returned my Xeon-D system for a refund and bought an i7-5820K with the money - for the kind of things I do I am not power-constrained and six fast cores are better than eight slow ones)
twnznz - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
The lack of DPDK support for Cortina CS4227 nullifies this board's usefulness for highspeed network routing applications, but moderate-speed (~3gbit) and fileserver tasks will probably fit happily.twnznz - Monday, January 18, 2016 - link
Scratch that - the Cortina CS4227 is the PHY chip, the MAC is contained in the Xeon D SoC itself, where all the packet magic happens. The Xeon-D 1541 contains an X552-class MAC, which is compatible with dpdk's 'igb' driver.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
You'll want the xxx8 variants for QuckAssist (xxx1 has a cut down version of quickassist the way I read it...)