Investigating Cavium's ThunderX: The First ARM Server SoC With Ambition
by Johan De Gelas on June 15, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- IT Computing
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- Microserver
- Cavium
The Top of the Line Xeon D: 16 Cores At 2.3 GHz
The Xeon D-1557 is a Xeon D with 12 cores running at 1.8 GHz most of the time (1.5 GHz base clock) that can boost to 2.1 GHz in single threaded circumstances. The reason for the modest clockspeed is simply the relatively low 45W TDP.
So if you need more CPU compute power, Intel has recently launched the Xeon D-1581, which contains 16 cores (32 threads) which can run at 2.3 GHz most of the time (1.8 GHz base), and boosts to 2.4 GHz. It does not seem to be available to everybody quite yet, but it is simply the slightly more powerful version of the earlier 1587, which runs one speed grade slower (1.7-2.3 GHz). Intel has not disclosed pricing yet, but it is not too hard to figure out. The Xeon D-1587 costs a daunting $1754, so it is very likely that the slightly faster Xeon D-1581 is around $1850.
To make the Xeon D-1581 equipped Supermicro X10SDV-7TP8F attractive, Supermicro turned it into a very luxurious board. They added the LSI 2116 RoC chip which adds up to 16 SATA3/SAS2 ports, and an Intel i350-AM4 (4 extra gigabit ports) and an Intel I210 (2 extra gigabit ports). So in total you can attach 4x SATA disks, 16x SAS disks, 6x GigE and 2x 10 GbE connections. Although we are impressed with the I/O capabilities, we feel that the Ethernet configuration is a bit too much of a good thing. If you configured something wrong, the fact that 3 different NIC chips are present makes debugging it harder. Nevertheless, it is an interesting alternative for a large part of the server market that does not need a 2 socket Xeon E5 but still needs a lot of local I/O.
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Daniel Egger - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I could hardly disagree more about the remote management of SuperMicro vs. HP. Remote management of HP is *the horror*, I've never seen worse and I've seen a lot. It's clunky, it requires a license to be useful (others do to but SuperMicro does not have such nonsense), the BCM tends to crash a lot (which is very annoying for a remote management solution), boot is even slower than all other systems I know due to the way they integrate the BIOS and remote management on the system and it also uses Java unless you have Windows machines around to use the .NET version.For the remote management alone I would chose SuperMicro over most other vendors any day.
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
I found the .Net client of HP much less sluggish, and I have seen no crashing at all. I guess there is no optimal remote management client, but I really like the "boot into firmware" option that Intel implemented.rahvin - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Not only that but Supermicro actually releases updates for their BCM's. I had the same shocked reaction to the HP claim. Started to wonder if I was the only one that thought supermicro was light years ahead in usability.I should note that Supermicro's awful Java tool works on Linux as well as windows. Though it refuses to run if your Java isn't the newest version available.
pencea - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
All these articles and yet still no review for the GTX 1080, while other major sites have already posted their reviews of both 1070 & 1080. Guru3D already has 2 custom 1080 and a custom 1070 review up.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
It'll be done when it's done.pencea - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Unacceptably late for something that should've been posted weeks ago.Meteor2 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Will anyone read it though? Your ad impressions are going to suffer.Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Maybe. Maybe not. But it's my own fault regardless. All I can do is get it done as soon as I reasonably can, and hope it's something you guys find useful.name99 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Give it a freaking rest. No-one is impressed by your constant whining about this.pencea - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Not looking to impress anyone. As a long time viewer of this site, I'm simply disappointed that a reputational site like this is constantly late for GPU reviews.