Iwill's innovative boards exposed

IWILL* HAD three interesting showings at Computex last week, a series of almost modular motherboards, an AMD motheboard with a twist, and a cable free barebone chassis. I am not sure which one was the most interesting, all were pretty unique.

First up is the motherboards, the Intel based DPK66xxx where xxx is the modular part. There are two form factors, DPK66S-xxx and DPK66-xxx, the one without the S is a longer form factor, the S-free one is a CEB form factor (IE shorter). From there, there is a DPK66S-SAS, DPK66S-SCSI, DPK66S, DPK66, and DPK66-V. In order they add SAS, SCSI, base model, CEB form factor base, and value. Take a look at the DPK66S-SCSI, a loaded board.

It is a two socket Blackford based Dempsey (RIP) and Woodcrest supporting S771 board. DPK66S-SCSI has the full compliment of 16 FBD slots, the requisite PCIe and PCI-X, along with a lonely PCI slot. The SCSI, hence the -SCSI in the name is just below the PCI slot. You can also see the digital VRMs between the FBDs and the CPUs, this alone is a major advance.

Now, compare this to the DPK66-V, the value board. You can see the smaller CEB form factor almost instantly. Gone is all the extra space between the components, and there are a ton of missing features. Most striking are the solder points for the extra FBDs, no space for SCSI/SAS chips, and missing PCI-X at higher speeds.

The Intel line is all variants on a theme, but the AMD line had a bunch of very different boards. The most interesting one was the DF88H, a socket F Opteron based board with an NVidia 2200 chipset. The thing that made my head spin was there are not one but two HTX slots on the board. I wonder if this is hinting at anything. Nah, couldn't be.

Last up we come to probably the most innovative bit, the Iwill H2111. It is the first cable free barebones chassis I have ever seen, and when I say cable free, I mean totally, completely almost really cable free. There are two cables, the fans each have about a one inch cable running to pins right behind them, and the power plane has a single cable to the motherboard.

Other than that, this chassis has no wires. If you think about airflow on a 1U box, this solves a lot of the problems a single loose cable can cause. While it is not 100% cable free, the extensive use of edge connectors and other tweaks have made it as close as you are going to find in a purchasable chassis.

Iwill had a lot more cool toys on the show floor, this was only some of the highlights. Innovation is definitely alive in the server segment, and Computex pointed that out several times. µ

* IWILL is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Flextronics.