Gigabyte has launched a new range of server motherboards based around the Intel Xeon processor D-1500 product family. All four motherboards come with one of Intel's Xeon D 14nm SoCs installed, offering a choice of multi-core processing power and networking configurations across the SKUs. These are all mini-ITX form factor motherboards made to be attractive to the same audience that the efficiency and density offered by Intel's SoCs would appeal to.
Intel's Xeon D-1500 processors are based upon the Broadwell architecture and built on the 14nm process. These chips are designed by Intel for use in high density and scale-out server infrastructures, being power efficient yet supporting data-centre features. Employing Xeon D-1500 processors should bring business benefits such as reduced TCO for your servers.
I've tabulated the key specification permutations between the four new motherboards (with links clickable to take you to the respective product pages) to make it easy for you to compare them:
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Processor |
Intel Xeon D-1521 processor (4 cores, 8 threads) |
Intel Xeon D-1541 processor (8 cores, 16 threads) |
Intel Xeon D-1521 processor (4 cores, 8 threads) |
Intel Xeon D-1541 processor (8 cores, 16 threads) |
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LAN |
Dual 10GbE SFP+ LAN ports + Dual GbE LAN ports |
Dual 10GbE SFP+ LAN ports + Dual GbE LAN ports |
Dual GbE LAN ports |
Dual GbE LAN ports |
As you can see above Gigabyte has produced four SKUs with variations between processor and networking solutions equipped. I noticed that the DS1 and DS0 suffixed models also missed out an internal USB 3.0 header that was present on the DS4 and DS3.
In other major features, the motherboards had a lot more in common such as; offering up to 128GB of ECC DDR4 memory @ 2133MHz, storage flexibility from 6 x SATA III 6Gb/s ports, a management LAN port and remote management functions via IPMI 2.0 web interface and iKVM, TPM socket, plus an integrated Easy BIOS update utility. Furthermore with this range of motherboards Gigabyte has implemented an all IR power design using OS-CON capacitors and high-end ferrite core chokes.
