Insane Supermicro Xeon-D board

[religiouslyconfused]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-7TP8F.cfm

Wow, what a board, 2 i210 LAN ports, 4 i350 ports, and 2 Intel 10Gbe ports. 16 core Xeon D CPU with 2 threads per core equaling 32 threads. Would make for an insane FreeNAS/Virtualization appliance with support up to 128 GB of ECC DDR4. Of course on Xeon D you need to use 32 GB RDIMMS to get that capacity as ECC UDIMM tops out at 16GB per stick. Not sure where to put this though, but if anybody had the cash and would be ok with the 1.7GHz CPU. I could see someone with ESXi or any other hypervisor doing some insane things with a board like this. Pricing would probably be very expensive, but there are now Pentium D CPU's which are Dual Core Xeon D's, and I don't see the point of them as the Pentium and Core i3 are already very power efficient, so no real need for those on FreeNAS.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, only $2330... there are better Xeon D deals out there. That board does have virtualization possibilities, though the cores:memory ratio is a bit off, and typically a hypervisor should be outfitted with a RAID controller, not an HBA. It'd be a great board for driving a FreeNAS based all flash array I think. But maybe a little too heavy on the 1GbE.

One of the big things for virtualization is that there's usually some sort of ratio for cores:memory that you want to hit. I think the 1540's at a pretty good point, but the 1587 is probably a little core-heavy. That 128GB cap is a bit limiting.

 

[TXAG26]

I think the lower power consumption probably makes up for the somewhat mismatch of the cores:memory ratio on all but the most over-subscribed hypervisors. I agree though, it's all a balance between power consumption and needed performance. Very cool that SM has taken integration to the next level, for not much of a price premium!