Supermicro stuns with four-socket, 1U Opteron bad boy

Stand back

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 11th March 2006 01:51 GMT

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Supermicro has crammed about as much processing power as possible into a 1U x86 box by delivering a four-socket Opteron-based system.

Customers can purchase a the H8QC8+ quad server board that holds up to four of AMD's dual-core 800 Series chips and supports a 1GHz Hypertransport link. Samples of the system have already started shipping and volume shipments should occur in the next few weeks. The board - without CPUs - starts at $1,300, while a server system without CPUs will start at $2,200. Check the board out here.

This is an OEM-only product, which is probably good because it's not for the faint of heart. Supermicro demands a 1,000 watt power supply to get this bad boy humming.

We're guessing that most customers will slot the 55 watt versions of Opteron (860, 865 and 870 HE) in this server. Supermicro also sells a 4U version of the box.

A Supermicro source rushed to claim some of the glory tied to rumors that Google has become a large Opteron shop.

"There's some truth to the rumors" about Supermicro supplying gear to Google, the source said. "It was happy days around here."

The source, however, declined to say how many systems Supermicro has shipped to Google.

Supermicro continues to hide its Opteron-based gear. You won't find any mention of the boxes on Supermicro's homepage or product page. It's an all Xeon affair.To dig deep on the Opteron front, you need to head here. A-plus, ya'll.

The four-socket 1U system would be impossible to build with today's Xeon chips. Supermicro has delivered a real workhorse, and we'll be curious to see the demand for such hardware. This should woo a few in the HPC market. ®

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