SUPERMICRO LAID OUT the Nehalem boards at IDF with no less than four solutions on hand. They had everything from 2S to 1/2U servers up and running.

Tylersburg workstation board

The first two were very similar, the X8DT3 and the X8DT3/i pictured above. The former has two sockets and an Intel IOH-36D chipset (aka Tylersburg). It will support three PCIe 2.0 8x slots, one physically 16x, and a lone 4x as well. There are eight LSI-based SAS ports, six SATA, dual LAN, VGA, six USB and optional KVMs.

If you lose the KVM and add in two full 16x slots instead of three 8x, you have a good idea what the /i variant is. The base board is for servers, the /i is for workstations. /i also loses the SAS ports, you can see the blanks on the lower left, but other than that, it is basically the same thing.

X58 with Infiniband

On the single socket front, what would a Nehalem linup be without an x58 board? To answer that, Supermicro was displaying the X8SAX. Not much to say here, but if you are looking for a workstation board, this one has all the normal x58 goodies plus 2 PCI-X slots and dual Firewire.

The last one they showed was a Tylersburg based Twin 1U machine. This one is called the SuperServer 1026JTT-IBX, and has optional Infiniband. If you are not familiar with the Twin 1U lineup, it is basically two half wide 1U 2S servers in a 1U case. The guts look kind of like this machine, but this new SKU packs Nehalems. Not a bad start for the upcoming chips. µ