Supermicro has just released a couple of Quad Xeon E5-4600 based motherboards. These boards are behemoth in size, much like quad AMD Opteron G34 motherboards, for obvious reasons. Packing Quad Intel Xeon E5-4600 CPU’s, 32x DDR3 DIMM slots capable of up to 1TB ECC memory and a few expansion slots to boot makes these new Supermicro Quad Intel Xeon motherboards very tightly packed despite their gargantuan size. They have options for built-in LSI SAS2208 RAID controller, Intel X540 Dual 10GbE LAN and IPMI v2.0. Strangely enough, there are only two PCIe 3.0 x16 and two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots for a total of 48 PCIe lanes from a total of 160 (40×4) available through the CPUs. Clearly Supermicro ran out of space as there are 32 DIMM slots and four large LGA2011 CPU sockets onboard. I can imagine there will be platforms that utilize all of that low-latency PCIe bandwidth but those will likely require riser cards due to space constraints.
I would hate to think how much this motherboard will cost (it will be quite expensive) or the scary thought of putting in 4x Intel Xeon E5-4600 series CPUs which come in at over $3,000 US for a quad core 2.7GHz Intel Xeon E5-4650 flavors, and yes that is over $3,000 each. The list of Cases that this will fit into will also be rather short because generally boards of this size leave little room for power supplies next to the motherboard in a rackmount chassis. For those needing the best in x86 CPU core/thread power right now (in a single system), this platform is going to be hard to beat.
Supermicro has released out the Supermicro X9QR7-TF+ with specs below. The Supermicro X9QRi-F+ is similar but does not include the LSI RAID controller and utilizes 1GbE instead of 10GbE.
Supermicro X9QR-7TF+
Specifications
Physical Stats
Form Factor
Proprietary
Dimensions
16.79″ x 16.4″ (42.6cm x 41.7cm)
Processor/Cache
CPU
Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor
Quad Socket R (LGA 2011)
Cache
Up to 20MB
System Bus
QPI up to 8 GT/s
System Memory
Memory Capacity
32x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM sockets
Supports up to 1TB DDR3 ECC Registered memory (RDIMM) in 32 DIMM sockets
That’s an impressive motherboard! Four CPUs, built-in 10GbE, built-in LSI RAID – who could ask for more? Me, it turns out. For my needs there are far too few PCIe slots and too few RAM slots – not that there is any real estate left on that enormous board to add them. 1TB of RAM really isn’t that much memory for such a massive amount of processing power and it would be difficult to push enough database IO through a mere four PCIe slots to keep those four CPUs busy.
That’s an impressive motherboard! Four CPUs, built-in 10GbE, built-in LSI RAID – who could ask for more? Me, it turns out. For my needs there are far too few PCIe slots and too few RAM slots – not that there is any real estate left on that enormous board to add them. 1TB of RAM really isn’t that much memory for such a massive amount of processing power and it would be difficult to push enough database IO through a mere four PCIe slots to keep those four CPUs busy.