ASRock Rack Announces EP2C612D24 and 4L: Dual Socket Haswell-EP with 24 DDR4 Slots
by Ian Cutress on May 23, 2015 8:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Memory
- DDR4
- Enterprise
- DRAM
- Servers
- ASRock Rack
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Two things jumped out at me when I received this press release. Firstly the name, which comes out as a mouthful – it isn’t something you could casually mention in conversation, even if you worked closely with the motherboard. The second is the amount of DRAM slots, which is ultimately what the EP2C612D24 and EP2C612D24-4L are catering for.
The Haswell-EP/Xeon E5 v3 DDR4 memory controllers are designed for up to three DIMMs per channel, similarly to Ivy Bridge-EP (E5 v2) and Sandy Bridge-EP (E5), although in all cases it is usually reserved for more niche systems. With 16GB UDIMMs, this allows for a maximum of 384GB, although moving up to RDIMM, LRDIMMs or 64GB NVDIMMs pushes the max to 1.5TB in a dual socket motherboard. Only those with deep pockets, big budgets or stringent requirements need apply, as the major cost here will be the DRAM.
The motherboard uses a staggered processor arrangement with narrow ILM versions of the LGA2011-3 socket. Combined with the 24 DRAM slots means there is little room for anything else. We get three PCIe 3.0 x8 slots which are open ended, allowing for x16 sized cards to come in, although one slot will be limited to reduced width cards as some of the DRAM slots would encroach a super long co-processor. The ten onboard SATA ports are supported by an M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and an onboard USB 3.0 Type-A port for in-chassis licensing dongles or Live-USB OSes. One downside to mention, according to the specifications for Haswell-EP, is that when fully populated, the memory should reduce down in speed, from 2133 to 1600 MHz.
Network connectivity is provided by an Intel i350 which gives four gigabit ports on the 4L model, but only two on the regular SKU, but we also get another network port for the AST2400 which provides IPMI 2.0 network management. ASRock Rack is targeting the usual suspects when it comes to large DRAM packages – intensive compute tasks, big data analysis, Hadoop and cloud computing.
Source: ASRock
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hughlle - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
Oh, and I used to have a dual Xeon machine. It worked just fine as a PC. Just because its not conventional, doesn't mean it didn't perform the role of a PC just dandy.HeyImHJ - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
Really, is this the nonsense you come up with? use a hardware that normally as a personal computer won't be used in its entirely just for the sake of calling it a Personal Computer. This is like saying that you would buy a bulldozer or an excavator -it can be a mean of transportation, why not?, to use it as a daily transportation like going from home to work, or home to school.By the time a personal computer use this level of hardware there will be dozens of generations ahead of this one. This isn't by any mean a "beast of a PC".
close - Monday, May 25, 2015 - link
I used a tractor head to split some firewood. I'll call it an ax. :)I understand what you guys are saying. But if you take a server and use it as a PC... it's a server used as a PC. Just like a PS3 used as a PC is still a console :). A phone used as a camera is still a phone. And this mobo will never ever make an overpowered PC for one simple reason: it offers no power for PC applications. So this server actually makes for an underpowered PC: slow to boot, slow GPU performance, slow memory, slow CPUs (lower freq, no OC), etc. A high end i7 blows this out of the water as a PC. Where this shines is server load (VMs for example). But then you leave the PC area.
SlyNine - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
You're just arguing semantics. No one could ever really be right or wrong here. Things are just whatever we call them. You could both just go on arguing forever because if he used it as a PC his argument is still valid, as is yours.agentbb007 - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
@close just give up, education to some is futile.HeyImHJ - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
If I had the money I'd estimate what the cost of all that would be, and give it to charity.yuhong - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
Actually, to software it does look the same, the main difference being that consumer software can't use that many cores well, not to mention NUMA.close - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
I said nothing about "how it looks" to the software. It's more about how it runs. Running on two cores in the same CPU is quite different than running on 2 cores in different CPUs when you also have to keep caches coherent and actually lose some of the peak performance. Also, desktop software is rarely so parallelized that it can take advantage of 20+ cores. This is why every test comparing MP platforms with high end desktop platforms showed the desktop as a winner in desktop tasks (games and all that).Spending for spending sake is when you buy an extra 1% in performance for 50% of the price. This is paying 5-10 times as much to actually lose performance :)).
SlyNine - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Hyper threading/SMT we used to pay more and lose performance. Some apps could still scale. In general I agree with you tho. It's a silly buy, but I don't think he has denied that.joex4444 - Monday, May 25, 2015 - link
While server boards do tend to have more to do for bootup, there's nothing that's inherent about a motherboard with completely passive parts that forces it to a) make a lot of noise or b) consume a lot of power, nor any of the rest. Servers (1U-4U cases) tend to be loud because they're full of numerous high RPM 40mm fans, especially for 1U. Servers tend to use a lot of power because they have 2 CPUs that are being used heavily - it's the workload not the hardware that causes that. While it doesn't have any PCIe x16 slots - look at the x8 slots it has. The back is open - they support x16 cards, but they will run at x8 (this is even written in the article). So yes, you can support a standard gaming or professional card. As far as the case goes, it's a standard SSI EEB sized board. There are numerous full tower cases that support those, which would clearly allow you to run a standard gaming graphics card in it. You're not at all limited to 1U, 2U, or any other server rack style case by this board's form factor.