What's wrong with the Gigabyte MP30-AR0? http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5422#...
It's sold as a server board in the $1000 range, but seems to fit the bill as far as the points in the blog article are concerned.
It's sold as a server board in the $1000 range, but seems to fit the bill as far as the points in the blog article are concerned.
(http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5423)
It definitely seemed a half-hearted effort from Gigabyte. Both our usual suppliers were able to source one, but the delivery date kept slipping. It did eventually arrive, months later, and by then we'd lost enthusiasm and/or found alternative ways of doing the work we'd planned for it.
Given my experience with another Gigabyte board, I can't recommend using their server platforms until they show a bit more care.
I know they've been doing custom integration in this space for a long time -- I remember an article about Google Nehalem servers, for example, that were OEMd by Gigabyte. And many of their efforts look like contract designs pushed out to market -- nothing wrong in that.
But they need to take a lesson from Supermicro's book in terms of attention-to-detail in and end-user support before I'll consider them worthy again.
Which is a shame, because their new CaviumX ARM platform looks very interesting indeed: http://www.servethehome.com/cavium-thunderx-micro-benchmarks...
There are some good things though: The IPMI support is excellent, it takes 128GB of RAM, and it's a solid workhorse. Here is mine: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/gigabyte-mp30-ar0/
I'm waiting for the new Cavium-based Gigabyte boards, which have 48 up to 384 (sic) cores.
http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/list.aspx?s=92&p=190&v=1029...
Are you sure that these core counts are per board and not per server/enclosure (i.e. 384 = 8 nodes x 48 cores per node in one case)?
If I were you I'd wait a bit for the Cavium-based Gigabyte boards. I have pricing for these which unfortunately I'm not permitted to reveal, but it will be very competitive.
The Caviums have lots of cores (48 / socket), but each core is pretty slow, like an Intel Atom. Caviums have tons of fast I/O. The challenge is to make software which can deal with this, since it's quite unlike Intel hardware (few, fast cores, slow I/O).
Regardless, I did a quick search and couldn't find anyone actually selling that board or listing a price.
Large german online store Mindfactory claims availability with 3-5 days for delivery time: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/Gigabyte-MP30-AR0...