Gigabyte launches four Intel Xeon D-1500 mini-ITX motherboards

[HEXUS]

All come with Intel Xeon D-1500 SoCs pre-installed for compact server purposes.

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[3dcandy]

Great for a small server but I'm guessing they won't be cheap

[DanceswithUnix]

Great for a small server but I'm guessing they won't be cheap

They have to be fairly cheap. The spec looks remarkably similar to the AMD ARM chips announced the other day: a pair of 10GbE ports, 128GB of ECC ram, 8 core. Those ARM chips are supposed to top out at $150, and don't require a fan.

[scaryjim]

An 8-core 2GHz + broadwell chip is going to have a fair bit more performance than AMD's arm cores, at a guess. The Xeon D 1521 on its own costs $199, according to ark: http://ark.intel.com/products/91202/...Cache-2_40-GHz so I doubt we'll see it in $150 motherboards

[LSG501]

An 8-core 2GHz + broadwell chip is going to have a fair bit more performance than AMD's arm cores, at a guess. The Xeon D 1521 on its own costs $199, according to ark: http://ark.intel.com/products/91202/...Cache-2_40-GHz so I doubt we'll see it in $150 motherboards

It depends on the workload but a highly specialised arm processor like the amd could be as good if not better than broadwell at being just a server where it's accessing the drives and sending the data to wherever.

[Mucka]

This could be a nice little board but i could not see any mention of what Raid it would support

[gagaga]

Would be nice if you could actually buy these. Xeon-D boards in the (non-data centre) wild are rare as hen's teeth (yes, I know you can get the Supermicro ones, but the ASRock rack ones on the other hand...).

[scaryjim]

It depends on the workload but a highly specialised arm processor like the amd could be as good if not better than broadwell at being just a server ....

Not sure how that's an answer to Broadwell being generally more performant and therefore more expensive? Different products for different markets. AMD's ARM boards will be great for certain workloads at a particular price point, no doubt, but that doesn't mean that all server boards must be priced to compete against it.

Intel's cheapest Xeon D 1500 processor is more expensive than DwU's quoted price for an AMD ARM system board, so Intel obviously see them as targeting a different market sector, even if the specifications are superficially similar. Part of that market differentiation will surely be that the Broadwell-based chips are higher performance cores, targeting computationally intensive workloads....

[DanceswithUnix]

Not sure how that's an answer to Broadwell being generally more performant and therefore more expensive? Different products for different markets. AMD's ARM boards will be great for certain workloads at a particular price point, no doubt, but that doesn't mean that all server boards must be priced to compete against it.

Intel's cheapest Xeon D 1500 processor is more expensive than DwU's quoted price for an AMD ARM system board, so Intel obviously see them as targeting a different market sector, even if the specifications are superficially similar. Part of that market differentiation will surely be that the Broadwell-based chips are higher performance cores, targeting computationally intensive workloads....

That $150 wasn't for the board, that was for just the chip albeit top of the range.

But yes, I would expect (well, hope at least) that a Broadwell would be faster. Thing is, with a base speed of only 2GHz that isn't going to be any kind of speed demon. OK it can turbo up, but then why the heck would you buy an 8 thread CPU unless you know you are going to be throwing enough work at it to keep it busy? So I'm guessing turbo is fairly pointless, 2GHz it is.

If the 4 thread model could sustain 3.5GHz, then that would be an entirely different game.

So, the ARM chip and the Xeon are fairly well matched for features (the ARM has an extra 6 SATA ports which it probably interesting only to a very limited Small Office 12 bay NAS market so meh there). The bottom of the range Xeon is $50 more than the most expensive ARM chip, has faster cores but half the number. That's probably about even throughput then, usually ARM cores are given mobile friendly ram interfaces and are only allowed to dissipate a few watts. Looking at what recent Nvidia Tegra chips are capable of (quad core A15 I think, but keeping up with mobile i3 in some benchmarks) I have to wonder just what an A57 can do with the brakes well and truly off.

Actually I want to know what an A72 can do with the brakes off, but no-one seems to be making one of those yet.

In both cases, I can only see these being used for IO bound tasks.

[LSG501]

Different products for different markets. AMD's ARM boards will be great for certain workloads at a particular price point, no doubt, but that doesn't mean that all server boards must be priced to compete against it.

exactly... you just proved my point, even though I didn't reference price in my earlier comment. Your original comment was far more sweeping than that though, it was implying that the broadwell would be the best option no matter what because it's 'more powerful'. ARM cpu's are no slouch these days especially when optimised for certain tasks.

[DanceswithUnix]

exactly... you just proved my point, even though I didn't reference price in my earlier comment. Your original comment was far more sweeping than that though, it was implying that the broadwell would be the best option no matter what because it's 'more powerful'. ARM cpu's are no slouch these days especially when optimised for certain tasks.

But that ignores a lesson from History...

At one point servers all used big RISC chips, but then Intel came in with something "good enough" but more importantly cheaper and slowly became dominant.

[LSG501]

But that ignores a lesson from History...

At one point servers all used big RISC chips, but then Intel came in with something "good enough" but more importantly cheaper and slowly became dominant.

um.... the arm processor would be the cheaper option here....