AMD EPYC on Mini-ITX - ASRock did it again

[Odaiba Alpine Club]

Summary

 

ASRock Rack launched ROMED4ID-2T motherboard, a Mini-ITX mobo that accommodate up to 64 core AMD EPYC server CPU. Actually its form factor is "Deep" Mini-ITX, being 170*208mm, and using one MATX screw hole.

 

Quotes

Quote

ASRock Rack, a branch of ASRock focused on making server products, has today launched a new motherboard that can accommodate up to 64 core AMD EPYC CPU. Built on the new, proprietary form factor called "Deep Mini-ITX", the ROMED4ID-2T motherboard is just a bit bigger than the standard ITX board. The standard ITX boards are 170 x 170 mm, while this Deep Mini-ITX form extends the board by a bit. It measures 170 x 208.28 mm, or 6.7" x 8.2" for all of the American readers. ASRock specifies that the board supports AMD's second-generation EPYC "Rome" 7002 series processors. Of course, the socket for these CPUs is socket SP3 (LGA4094) with 4094 pins.

The motherboard comes with 4 DDR4 DIMM slots, of any type. Supported DIMM types are R-DIMM, LR-DIMM, and NV-DIMM. If you want the best capacity, LR-DIMM use enables you to use up to 256 GB of memory. When it comes to expansion, you can hook-up any PCIe 4.0 device to the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. There is also an M.2 2280 key present, so you can fit in one of those high-speed PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSDs. For connection to the outside world, the board uses an Intel X550-AT2 controller that controls two RJ45 10 GbE connectors. There are also two Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8 or 8 SATA 6 Gb/s), and four Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8) storage U.2 ports.

 

My thoughts

 

This type of mobo has already seen on an LTT video(https://youtu.be/nF3w-xnkRwE), this is its AMD version. Thanks to its "deeper" profile, now this mobo is equipped with standard DIMM slots rather than SODIMM ones, and has some bonus space for front M.2 SSD slot. Yeah... it's still stupid. EPYC CPUs can handle up to 8 channel RAMs but this can house only 4 RAM sticks, and PCIe slot is limited to just one. But if you're into some small form factor overpowered video editing or rendering... or just for fun somethingy stuff, this is for you. In that context, I think it will be very good for LTT video material.

 

 

Sources

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/275208/asrock-rack-brings-amd-epyc-cpus-to-deep-mini-itx-form-factor

[trag1c]

These boards would probably be kick ass for DIY compact home render/simulation farm. Only 4 dim slots sucks but you can get very high density ram to offset that.

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, trag1c said:

These boards would probably be kick ass for DIY compact home render/simulation farm. Only 4 dim slots sucks but you can get very high density ram to offset that.

like hynix 128gb ram modules, do the job don't they

[Ankh Tech]

but how many sas slots

[trag1c]

1 minute ago, Ankh Tech said:

like hynix 128gb ram modules, do the job don't they

This^^

[Odaiba Alpine Club]

1 minute ago, trag1c said:

These boards would probably be kick ass for DIY compact home render/simulation farm. Only 4 dim slots sucks but you can get very high density ram to offset that.

I agree with that... Sadly(?) there is no ITX TRX40 board...

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, Odaiba Alpine Club said:

I agree with that... Sadly(?) there is no ITX TRX40 board...

yeah, that is all I hope for, so that you can get small form factor high gaming performance, why don't they do it, come on asrock, do another experiment

[trag1c]

Just now, Odaiba Alpine Club said:

I agree with that... Sadly(?) there is no ITX TRX40 board...

lol. The only shitty thing with TR is no ECC so you can't get the ludicrous ram going. 8 channel ram and dual socket support I could live without but being able to get those ECC dimms for a use case like the one I stated would be huge. It's still never going to cut into their bottom line since anyone who's truly am enterprise user will be going with the whole 9 yards so what does it hurt to give us ECC for our crazy home projects.

[Ankh Tech]

1 minute ago, trag1c said:

lol. The only shitty thing with TR is no ECC so you can't get the ludicrous ram going. 8 channel ram and dual socket support I could live without but being able to get those ECC dimms for a use case like the one I stated would be huge. It's still never going to cut into their bottom line since anyone who's truly am enterprise user will be going with the whole 9 yards so what does it hurt to give us ECC for our crazy home projects.

yeah, and nas projects, ecc is a must for me, so I really want tr4 with ecc. Also for tiny insane gaming builds, we can use a itx trx40 board

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

yeah, that is all I hope for, so that you can get small form factor high gaming performance, why don't they do it, come on asrock, do another experiment

I recently spoke to a distributor about ASRock Rack's projects. They're funded by companies who need them for specific tasks, then they make some more if they get enough attention. That'll never happen on a mainstream platform, sadly. Though I so appreciate that they squeezed out the X399M that one time.

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, Den-Fi said:

I recently spoke to a distributor about ASRock Rack's projects. They're funded by companies who need them for specific tasks, then they make some more if they get enough attention. That'll never happen on a mainstream platform, sadly. Though I so appreciate that they squeezed out the X399M that one time.

so no trx40 itx, I am sad, well, when I grow up and start making my own motherboards, I'll be even odder than asrock

[trag1c]

8 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

so no trx40 itx, I am sad, well, when I grow up and start making my own motherboards, I'll be even odder than asrock

Having done a fair bit of circuit board design I wouldn't touch trying to design one of these ITX [insert some insane socket here] boards for the simple fact that routing traces is going to be a nightmare coupled with stupidly high frequency signals everywhere = no bueno. Also would never touch cell phones either for the exact same reason.

 

Though I guess theres a reason you can get like 22 layer circuit boards that will only cost you your first born child.

[Ankh Tech]

1 minute ago, trag1c said:

Having done a fair bit of circuit board design I wouldn't touch trying to design one of these ITX [insert some insane socket here] boards for the simple fact that routing traces is going to be a nightmare coupled with stupidly high frequency signals everywhere = no bueno. Also would never touch cell phones either for the exact same reason.

 

Though I guess theres a reason you can get like 22 layer circuit boards that will only cost you your first born child.

well I'll start like lmg, but grow into selling stuff like corsair but basic then actually start selling motherboards, then maybe my own cpu, ambitious I know. But nothing is impossible

[Lord Vile]

 

[porina]

It hurts to see the crippled ram layout, but I guess it is sufficient for light usage cases. I wonder if they could have given it the full ram support if they went SODIMM instead?

[Ankh Tech]

7 minutes ago, porina said:

It hurts to see the crippled ram layout, but I guess it is sufficient for light usage cases. I wonder if they could have given it the full ram support if they went SODIMM instead?

no you can get the extremely normal hynix 128gb ram module, Like any sane human

[porina]

Just now, Ankh Tech said:

no you can get the extremely normal hynix 128gb ram module, Like any sane human

I'm not talking about capacity, I'm talking channels. This product is clearly aimed at use cases where the already low memory bandwidth is not a concern  (Cinebench users rejoice). IMO even the full 8 channels isn't really enough to feed it under more stressful workloads.

[Ankh Tech]

1 minute ago, porina said:

I'm not talking about capacity, I'm talking channels. This product is clearly aimed at use cases where the already low memory bandwidth is not a concern  (Cinebench users rejoice). IMO even the full 8 channels isn't really enough to feed it under more stressful workloads.

well, we'll see what epyc 7003 will give us, maybe xl-atx will be needed for dual 7003

[trag1c]

25 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

well I'll start like lmg, but grow into selling stuff like corsair but basic then actually start selling motherboards, then maybe my own cpu, ambitious I know. But nothing is impossible

At least for the CPU part we're starting to get there, especially with open source architectures like RISC-V. With PCB manufacturing the reason you can actually get boards as a small guy is because of batch manufacturing where the entire panel is shared with other peoples designs essentially splitting the cost between designs. Before that became a thing you would be spending 10s of thousands because you would have to pay for the entire production run, god forbid if you needed anything more than a 2 layer board with basic tolerances. Now for integrated circuits there's a company that negotiates with TSMC and Global Foundries that takes your design and sticks it on a wafer with others. Their production runs are usually several months apart and for only 1 process at a time so if you wanted TSMC 7nm you would have to wait till they have that process scheduled.

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, trag1c said:

At least for the CPU part we're starting to get there, especially with open source architectures like RISC-V. With PCB manufacturing the reason you can actually get boards as a small guy is because of batch manufacturing where the entire panel is shared with other peoples designs essentially splitting the cost between designs. Before that became a thing you would be spending 10s of thousands because you would have to pay for the entire production run, god forbid if you needed anything more than a 2 layer board with basic tolerances. Now for integrated circuits there's a company that negotiates with TSMC and Global Foundries that takes your design and sticks it on a wafer with others. Their production runs are usually several months apart and for only 1 process at a time so if you wanted TSMC 7nm you would have to wait till they have that process scheduled.

yeah, well I'm in year 8, so when I leave college, we would've achieved 1nm, maybe lower

[williamcll]

I hope there will be a TR40x as well. would be an amazing Productivity/Coding PC for people in an office.

[trag1c]

1 minute ago, williamcll said:

I hope there will be a TR40x as well. would be an amazing Productivity/Coding PC for people in an office.

I should have added that to my post as well. Would be fantastic for a build server lol.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Ankh Tech said:

yeah, and nas projects, ecc is a must for me, so I really want tr4 with ecc. Also for tiny insane gaming builds, we can use a itx trx40 board

TR and Ryzen both do actually support ECC memory, what they do not support is Registered and Load Reduced ECC (RDIMM & LRDIMM). So you can use ECC UDIMM just fine, but these do not support larger capacity DIMM sizes.

[NumLock21]

with Intel ATX 12vo, I can see many iTX boards with large sockets like that TR4s in the future.

[CephDigital]

Only thing I can say is just bruh.

 

It's cool though.