Earlier this year, Intel released its Xeon D processor, the company’s first system-on-chip (SoC) built for the Xeon lineup. ASRock Rack has just announced two new motherboards for the Xeon D1500 series, which come in micro-ATX and mini-ITX varieties.
Micro ATX: D1540D4U-2T2O8R
ASRock Rack’s D1540D4U-2T2O8R is a micro-ATX motherboard that features an 8-core Xeon D1540 processor soldered right into the board using Intel’s interconnect. The four DIMM slots provide support for up to 128 GB of DDR4 2133/1866 ECC memory. There are six SATA 6 Gb/s ports provided by the Xeon D1500 chipset, and for more storage options, this motherboard sports an eight-port SAS 12 Gb/s interface in the form of an LSI 3008 controller with mini SAS HD connectors. Dual M.2 slots using a Marvell 9172 controller provides even more expansion capabilities.
There are two PCI-e 3.0 slots on the motherboard; one x16 slot and one half-size x8 slot (both running at x8 mode). Dual 10G Ethernet support is provided by an Intel X540 controller using two RJ45 ports, and two more 10G connections are provided by the PCH CS422 controller using dual small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers. This is a maximum of 40G Ethernet support, which is quite impressive. In addition, the integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and dedicated LAN supports remote system management.
Mini ITX: D1520D4I
The D1520D4I is a mini-ITX offering that features the quad-core Intel Xeon 1520 SoC. Despite its small form factor, the motherboard sports four full-sized ECC DIMM slots and supports up to 128 GB of DDR4 2133/1866 RAM. For storage, there are six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, with four ports supporting mini SAS connections and one port supporting SATA DOM.
There aren’t many expansion options for this motherboard, with only one PCI-e 3.0 x 16 slot available and one M.2 slot. However, two RJ45 ports support dual 10G Ethernet via an Intel i210 controller. This mini-ITX offering also sports an integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and dedicated LAN.
AsRock Rack’s new Xeon D motherboards are designed as scalable micro server nodes for the web service market, with powerful networking capabilities and features intended to handle lightweight hyper-scale workloads.
These motherboards support 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2. They also support Linux platforms such as CentOS 6.6 and 7.0 (32- and 64-bit), SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 11 SP3 (32- and 64-bit), FreeBSD 10.1 (32- and 64-bit), Fedora Core 22 (64-bit), Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 (64-bit), RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 6.6 and 7.0 (32- and 64-bit), in addition to virtual platforms like VMWare’s ESXi 5.5.
