Supermicro New Zealand
X9D Generation Platform (Romley-EP)
30 April 2012

For the past 2 years we have been served well by the X8D platform (Tylersburg-EP). This month marks the transition to X9D (Romley-EP) for dual socket Xeon servers and workstations. The Romley-EP platform consists of the Sandy Bridge-EP processor (Intel E5-2600 series as introduced last month) and the Patsburg chipset (Intel C600 series).

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The new motherboard will take the new LGA 2011 socket Xeon E5-2600 series processors and provide Quad Channel interleaved memory performance per CPU via 16 DIMM sockets. The new processors can have up to 8C/16T per CPU (i.e. up to 32 logical processors per system) and will support up to 512GB of main system ECC memory.

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Motherboard features:
  1. Dual socket R (LGA 2011) supports Intel Xeon processor E5-2600
  2. Intel C602 chipset; QPI up to 8.0GT/s
  3. Up to 512GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC Registered DIMM; 16x DIMM sockets
  4. 3x PCI-E 3.0 x16 and 3x PCI-E 3.0 x8
  5. Intel i350 Dual port GbE LAN
  6. 8x SATA2 and 2x SATA3 ports
  7. Integrated IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN
  8. 11x USB 2.0 ports (4 rear, 6 via header + 1 Type A)

The new platform supports PCI-Express 3.0, 6 x SATA ports (with 2 ports supporting 6Gbps SSDs or HDDs) and another 4 x SATA ports via an onboard SFF-8087 socket. Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) HostRAID will be available as the default option, with LSI Software RAID (BIOS-assisted Host RAID) as an alternative option in the BIOS.

Of special note is the lack of PCI slots - there are 6 x PCI-Express slots instead (x16 and x8 gen 3.0). These slots will provide sufficient bandwidth for all current generation cards. IPMI 2.0 with Virtual KVM and Media over IP is provided via a dedicated network port in addition to the 2 standard Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports (new Intel i350 NIC).

As before the new platform will be available for all form factors to suit your applications - 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U or 5U/Full Tower. Please contact us if you need more information or assistance with your planning.

Editor

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