The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on March 6, 2012 9:27 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Virtualization
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
The Intel S2600GZ board
Our Intel R2208GZ4GSSPP had the Intel S2600GZ "Grizzly Pass" board inside. The board has been qualified for all major virtualization solutions: Citrix Xenserver, Hyper-V, SLES 11, Oracle's VM server, RHEL and VMware vSphere of course. It can also be used as basis for almost every independent storage software vendor: DataCore, Falconstore, Gluster, Microsoft's iSCSI target, Nexenta, Open-E and Stormagic.
The board has a cooling and power-friendly spread core design: the airflow of one heatsink does not get used to cool another heatsink. The board features up to 24 DIMMs, which support Low Power, Unregistered and Registered DDR3 (up to 1600 MHz) and LR-DIMMs. Four GBe interfaces are on board and an optional I/O module can add dual 10 GBe (Base-T or optical) or QDR infiniband. Meanwhile the C600 chipset offers 8 SAS/SATA ports (2x 6G) and a PCIe 3.0 x8 module slot for stroage purposes. This slot can be used for setups such as the LSI 2208 dual core ROC controller based RAID card with two 8087 SAS connectors and 1 GB of 1033 MHz DDR3 cache.
Last but not least: the board has two PCIe x24 "super slots" which allows for the use of two risers. Each riser contains 3 PCIe 3.0 x8 slots: two half height slots and a full height slot. Finally, powering the system is a small 750 Watt PSU rated for 80 PLUS Platinum.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Put some sarcasm tags in there to save some people from getting confused...cynic783 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
definitely sarcastic. i was actually surprised not to see any fanbois so I thought I'd pretendbadjohny - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I have no doubt these chips or something similar will end up in the new mac pros. Who are in a very bad need of a refresh.Shuxclams - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Looking at a complete visualization transformation in our server room, looks like the decision was made for us as far as architecture. Wow....TeXWiller - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
<quote>The new Xeon also supports faster DDR-3 1600. Contrary to the Interlagos Opteron which can only support this memory speed with one DIMM per channel</quote>Interlagos supports memory up to DDR3-1600 using two single rank memory modules, or one single rank and one double rank module if using registered memory, and two single rank modules if using unbuffered memory. DDR3-1866 is supported on a single load-reduced registered, or on a single unbuffered module per channel. It depends on the board manufacturer and more importantly, it can be all read on the manual, so to speak.davegraham - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
AMD Interlagos can support more than 1 DDR3-1600 ECC/REG dimm per channel. I run 8 on a single socket 6276 and it works at the rated speed.TeXWiller - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Too bad these kinds of errors in the articles are not usually fixed.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I will double check .meloz - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Just wanted to congratulate Johan on a job well done. Very thorough analysis, Intel have achieved a very dominant position with this new platform and this is reflected in pricing of their processors as well!AMD was already a sub 10% niche (with a market share to mirror) in the data center, now even that niche has evaporated.
New Opterons (based on Piledriver) might decrease the performance gap to Intel under certain benchmarks, but I doubt they will beat Intel. Intel has plenty of SKUs above the quickest AMD Opterons to adjust prices and kill any new challenge from AMD, instantly.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Thanks! Although I hope Intel gets a bit more competition though.