Asrock Rack and SuperMicro announces Xeon Phi systems

[NumLock21]

At this years Intel Developer Forum 2016, with everyone talking about Xeon Phi (Knights Landing), Asrock was the first to announced their 2U server system based on this new processor. Asrock Rack's 2U4N-F/X200, is a 2U server system, containing 4 nodes, with each node having its own Xeon Phi processor, 6 DDR4 DIMM slots supporting both R/LRDIMMs, 2 PCie 3.0 x2 slots, dual Intel i350 lan ports, a M.2 and 4x 2.5" drive bays for SATA, SAS, or NVMe, SSDs and HDDs on a half width motherboard. All of this, is powered by a 1600w 80Plus Platinum rated redundant power supply.

Next up is SuperMicro's 5028TK-HTR, also a 2U server system containing 4 nodes, similar to the Asrock Rack one. 12x 3.5" drive bays for SAS or SATA SSDs/HDDs, note that each node only gets 3 drives, and 2 half height PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. SuperMicro bundles their 2U Xeon Phi server, with a 2000w redundant power supply, that's 400w more than the Asrock.

The second unit announced by SuperMicro is their SuperWorkstation 5038K-i. It's uses their KISPE motherboard, that runs on the Intel LGA 3467 for the Xeon Phi X200 processors, 6 DDR4 DIMM slots, up to 2400MHz, and 192GB max for ECC RDIMM or 384GB max for ECC LDIMM. 2x PCIe 3.0 x16, 1x PCIe 3.0 x4, 10x SATA 6G, a single 24, and dual 8 to run it. On the I/O side, it has dual Intel i350 gigabit lan, a IMPI 2.0 port supporting KVM over Lan, 5x USB 3 with 1 on through a header, 1x USB 2 via header, and a VGA output running off a 3rd party graphic controller. The unit comes in a standard desktop tower case, with 2x 5.25" external drive bays, 6x 3.5" and 4x 2.5" internal drive bays. For power SuperMicro is using a 750w powered by Seasonic. The processor, is cooled by a custom dual rad 120mm all in one liquid cooler. While the motherboard is a standard ATX, it will not be sold as a separate unit. To get it, users must by the entire prebuilt system from SuperMicro.

All units, runs on Intel socket 3467, 64-72 cores quad threaded, running at 1.3GHz to 1.5GHz, 36MB of L2 cache, 16GB of High Performance Memory (MCDRAM), and 36 PCIe 3.0 lanes. These Xeon Phi X200 are host processors, and this means they can run a OS, such as Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

 

One of the nodes on the Asrock

Asrock Rack 2U Xeon Phi server, with 4 Xeon Phi nodes

 

SuperMicro's 2U Xeon Phi server and Workstation

Workstation's internals components

 

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10553/asrock-rack-launches-2u4nf-x-200-knights-landing-xeon-phi-cpu

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10584/supermicro-rollsout-superserver-and-superworkstation-systems-featuring-xeon-phi-x200

 

 

[vanished]

That is a massive socket...

[PRTI]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That is a massive socket...

Yeah...

[patrickjp93]

6 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That is a massive socket...

Designed for MASSIVE interfacing

[vanished]

1 minute ago, patrickjp93 said:

Designed for MASSIVE interfacing

True  

 

Now the only question is how long until Linus thinks he needs one of these for the office  

[RexinOridle]

Wait, will it play Crysis?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, RexinOridle said:

Wait, will it play Crysis?

If it can run windows it can. This might be linux only for a while, but should be alble to run windows. 

 

The only thing is its basically a 80 core atom cpu, so very low single threaded performance.

[NumLock21]

6 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

True  

 

Now the only question is how long until Linus thinks he needs one of these for the office  

Like right now

 

 

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If it can run windows it can. This might be linux only for a while, but should be alble to run windows. 

 

The only thing is its basically a 80 core atom cpu, so very low single threaded performance.

It's 72 cores and 288 threads. Each core is quad thread. It supports windows, so yeah it should run crysis.

[vanished]

These things are really unusual... they're not just a Xeon taken to the extreme (even more cores, even lower frequency).  They're fundamentally different in some ways... Not as alien as an ARM CPU but definitely weird.  I hope Linus does a video on them for LTT or FAP at some point

[patrickjp93]

2 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

These things are really unusual... they're not just a Xeon taken to the extreme (even more cores, even lower frequency).  They're fundamentally different in some ways... Not as alien as an ARM CPU but definitely weird.  I hope Linus does a video on them for LTT or FAP at some point

They're designed for heavily vectorized, highly parallel code, or having a bunch of asynchronous easy tasks (email for example). Just one of these could replace several of Google's GMail server nodes.

[NumLock21]

Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 vs Single Xeon Phi 7290

 

2x 2699 v4 @ 2.2GHz, 44 cores, 88 threads vs 1x 7290 @ 1.5GHz, 72 cores, 288 threads

Hmm.....

[Misanthrope]

10 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That is a massive socket...

 

Spoiler

That's what he said

 

And yeah this does look nice but I thought Knight's landing was going to be more of a co-processor ala GPU but here seems to be the main workstation processor? I'm sure someone at LMG is already planning on getting one of these for their server room or rendering tasks.

[Curufinwe_wins]

8 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

They're designed for heavily vectorized, highly parallel code, or having a bunch of asynchronous easy tasks (email for example). Just one of these could replace several of Google's GMail server nodes.

Intel's swing at power9 servers?

[NumLock21]

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

That's what he said

 

And yeah this does look nice but I thought Knight's landing was going to be more of a co-processor ala GPU but here seems to be the main workstation processor? I'm sure someone at LMG is already planning on getting one of these for their server room or rendering tasks.

Their previous gen are only co-processors. But this new one comes as a host or co-processor.

[patrickjp93]

2 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Intel's swing at power9 servers?

No, Power 8 and Power 9 are scale-up designs that are incredibly well-suited to highly volatile databases and analytics workloads where more threads are good but more cores (more caches to dirty) are bad. You could say this is a swing at IBM's presence in the big supercomputers, but not in a general sense.

[patrickjp93]

7 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 vs Single Xeon Phi 7290

 

2x 2699 v4 @ 2.2GHz, 44 cores, 88 threads vs 1x 7290 @ 1.5GHz, 72 cores, 288 threads

Hmm.....

22 * 2 * 256/32 * 2.2 * 10^9 = 774.4 * 10^9

 

72 * 2 * 1024/32 * 1.5 * 10^9 = 6.912 * 10^12

[Curufinwe_wins]

13 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

No, Power 8 and Power 9 are scale-up designs that are incredibly well-suited to highly volatile databases and analytics workloads where more threads are good but more cores (more caches to dirty) are bad. You could say this is a swing at IBM's presence in the big supercomputers, but not in a general sense.

Oh, ok, thanks for the clarification.  I wasn't sure how good/bad power9 would be at email type issues (I know that's one of the things ARM servers have been "targeting" for ages.)

[AlexGoesHigh]

That's the socket skylake e is planned to have isn't it? or at least similar, when someone posted skylake e leaks/rumors the picture looked kinda like that one.

 

Also that waterblock in the workstation looks pretty badass.

[NumLock21]

36 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

22 * 2 * 256/32 * 2.2 * 10^9 = 774.4 * 10^9

 

72 * 2 * 1024/32 * 1.5 * 10^9 = 6.912 * 10^12

I get where the 22 and 72 comes from, as well as the stock clocks. Have a difficult time figuring out where you got that 256 and 1024. Does "32" stand for 32bit?

 

[patrickjp93]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Oh, ok, thanks for the clarification.  I wasn't sure how good/bad power9 would be at email type issues (I know that's one of the things ARM servers have been "targeting" for ages.)

If a low-clock variant was designed, there's no reason it would be bad other than price, but Power 8s are 200W+ chips. The flagship pulls 300W for 12 cores at 4.7GHz.

 

51 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

I get where the 22 and 72 comes from, as well as the stock clocks. Have a difficult time figuring out where you got that 256 and 1024. Does "32" stand for 32bit?

 

Broadwell has 1 256-bit vector unit per core. KNL has 2 512-bit vector units per core. 32 is 32-bits per datem. The stray 2 is to account for FMA. That total calculation is the Flops for single precision (or integer Ops since AVX handles integer ops too).

[Curufinwe_wins]

55 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

If a low-clock variant was designed, there's no reason it would be bad other than price, but Power 8s are 200W+ chips. The flagship pulls 300W for 12 cores at 4.7GHz.

 

Broadwell has 1 256-bit vector unit per core. KNL has 2 512-bit vector units per core. 32 is 32-bits per datem. The stray 2 is to account for FMA. That total calculation is the Flops for single precision (or integer Ops since AVX handles integer ops too).

And now I feel like an idiot for forgetting that.... Sure the super amazing (at that type of workload) chip would be super amazing, it's just insanely inefficient and overkill (also the fact that ARM cpus were actually kinda competing there should have been the self evident no power9 allowed statement, but I totally blanked.)

[Marinatall_Ironside]

For all of you who think you can game on one of these bad boys, forget it. There's no way there is any kind of support for that hardware at all.

 

A machine like this is especially designed for HPC like a couple of people here pointed out, and I can understand that. Hell, if I needed something for HPC tasks and I had the money walkin' around, I'll go and hit up Supermicro or someone who's selling one of these machines 

[Marinatall_Ironside]

2 hours ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

That's the socket skylake e is planned to have isn't it? or at least similar, when someone posted skylake e leaks/rumors the picture looked kinda like that one.

That is never likely to happen at all. I may be wrong, but from a logical standpoint I just don't see a realistic usage in the consumer world because let's face it, who really needs to have more than 10 cores on the consumer side of things and 22 cores on the professional side of things?

[snowComet]

I would love to see a motherboard for dual Xeon Phi... the socket is so big that I think cpu riser card could be used, so that we could put two Xeon Phis (or more) in one board....

[patrickjp93]

On August 25, 2559 BE at 7:01 AM, AlexGoesHigh said:

That's the socket skylake e is planned to have isn't it? or at least similar, when someone posted skylake e leaks/rumors the picture looked kinda like that one.

 

Also that waterblock in the workstation looks pretty badass.

Skylake Purley. I think Skylake E was rumored to be on something like LGA2066 a short while ago