Supermicro shows off future servers

SUPERMICRO HAD TONS of upcoming products on display at Computex, its booth was a tour de force of upcoming Intel platorms, and a few AMD ones as well.

On the Intel side, it had the above working Seaburg server, and a non-working Seaburg workstation behind it. Right next to that, it had a Caneland 4-way machine that was not working either. In any case, it had boxes for everything.

Supermicro also has boards for everything, this is the Seaburg based X7DW3+, a 2S server platform. Not much to say here, it is a very well documented platform, and the boards look ready to go. Note the 16 FBD slots, 8x beside 3 4x PCIe slots, PCI-X 100/133 and a massive bank of VRMs. The long slot beside the 8x slot is for a riser card.

The next one is Tigerton, the first 4S Core Number Numeral Core Number based system. There are a few things to note on this board, technically called the X7QC3. First, notice the massive heatsink on the chipset? Take two Blackfords and weld them together, bump up the clock and you have a large power draw, I guesstimate 50-60W.

Next, look at the rather unusual arrangement of the CPUs. If you look at the Intel board from a few months ago, they were all parallel, this time they are in an arc. Not the end of the world, but it is unusual. Last up, there are an odd number of DIMMs, 24 FBD slots to be exact. This is obviously not the Intel reference design.

Moving on to AMD, there were not all that many new boards on display at the booth. Barcelona does not need a new platform so new boards are an option, not a necessity. There was a working Barcelona system playing videos for the entire show, but they would not let you near it.

The one interesting new part it had was called the Superblade. Henri Richard introduced it at the AMD press conference earlier in the show, and it looks interesting. The chassis is 7U and houses 10 blades. With Barcelonas on board, that means 16 cores per 4S blade, 160 cores per 7U.

That give you 960 cores per rack, enough for most households. On top of that, they have 90% efficient PSUs and Infiniband support. These look to be a nice product, or they will be once Barcelona comes out.

Overall, if it is a server product, Supermicro had it on display at the show. There was little near future that it did not have on the wall or running in a case. µ