Low power Supermicro cruncher
28 Apr 2015 19:48:39 UTC
Topic 198069
(moderation:
I came across this new ITX motherboard from Supermicro.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-F.cfm
http://ark.intel.com/products/87039/Intel-Xeon-Processor-D-1540-12M-Cache-2_00-GHz
The motherboard has an integrated Intel D-1540 Xeon CPU which is based on Broadwell, has 8-cores plus HT, and a TDP of 45w. There is support for DDR4 and the motherboard has a M.2 x4 slot.
I was thinking this would make for a good low power cruncher for this project with minimal space requirement and can be setup with a single graphics card. I read in another thread here that the GW Search application will be supporting AVX with a future update. The D-1540 does support AVX 2.0. Although, I am not sure what the all-core frequency would be for an AVX load. I know Intel scales back the frequency on their E5-2600 v3 CPUs when there is an AVX load present to stay within power and thermal specs. The same may apply to this new CPU.
I found a website that has the board with CPU listed at $780. The up front cost is a bit on the high side but the power draw should be excellent for what it offers. A board like this could be run open air with a fan or two. It would require a PSU, two sticks of DDR4 2133 MHz memory, a drive, and optionally a graphics card for BRP6.
Low power Supermicro cruncher
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I have owned exactly two cpu built into the mb pc's and never will again, when they decide to give up they take the whole thing with them and then you have nothing. At least most of the time a cpu gives up, overheats, etc, etc you can remove the cpu and add some new goop or drop in a new one, but not so for the built into the mb ones. No upgrading options either down the road.
RE: I came across this new
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I was thinking about such solution too.
However, I guess it will be very hard to place a video card in iTX box and to keep appropriate temperature inside.
RE: I have owned exactly
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These are good points regarding CPU and MB being tied together. It would be nice if Intel offered more than 4-cores per CPU with their mainstream desktop products but it looks like that even with the upcoming Skylake, 4-cores will be the limit. 8-core is available for the enthusiast line but these CPUs have an IMC with four memory channels which takes up too much room for an ITX solution. The price on these CPUs (5960x) cost in the range of $950 - $1K which is very high for just a CPU.
RE: I was thinking about
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I would probably run the motherboard without a case and have a 120mm or 140mm fan blow air over both the GPU and CPU. I have a 24-pin y-cable. My thought was to connect two of these small boards on one 750w PSU and give each one a fan for airflow.
I don't know of any real
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I don't know of any real product reviews, but Xeon D should be excellent for quite a few markets. Intel knows this, though, and charges accordingly. 780$ will be difficult to recoup even with German electricity prices.
8 cores are great for BOINC. But under full load I wouldn't expect more than the promised 2.0 GHz, especially with well-optimized apps. This just takes a 4.0 GHz Quad to tie the performance. The Broadwell dekstop CPUs, which are rumored to arrive around Computex at the beginning of June, promise about 3.3 GHz base clock on 4 cores for just 65 W TDP. They allow you to use cheaper DDR3, are socketed and allow you to use relatively cheap regular mainboards. They're unlocked, feature a GPU with 48 shaders (regular Haswells have 20) and an eDRAM cache to keep the cores and especially the GPU busy. I'm still quoting rumors here, but the information looks relatively solid. So for 20 W higher CPU power consumption (~40€/year in Germany) you'd get almost as much CPU performance and a GPU which - compared to the CPU - is relatively powerful at Einstein.
And all this for consumer instead of server prices. What ever you do, at least hold on until you see what these are really capable of. Oh, and 1 quarter later Skylake should arrive. It should bring a significant architectural update, but the details are still scarce.
And, what ever you do: don't run 45 W CPUs with 750 W PSUs! The load will be so low that it's operating in a very inefficient range, negating the power savings from the small CPU to an uncomfortable extent. Even if you use 2 of these systems. The smallest 80+ Gold PSUs provide 350 W, and even they'd be far too large for 2 of these systems (unless you outfit tem with moderately powerful GPUs).
MrS
Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002