A Huge Irony? Intel Server Mainboards with AMD Graphics

Intel presented a lot of interesting products and features at this year's Intel Developer Forum and the first place was taken by the upcoming generation of central processing units, just like it was expected. Right after that, Intel also presented a number of innovative technologies and even some portions of its roadmaps, concerning not only the desktop and notebook computing platforms, but also the server market segment.

It is well known that Intel plans to upgrade its product lines with central processing units, chipsets and wireless networking interface cards rather sooner than later and some of these new products were proudly displayed at the Intel Developer Forum show. Among them, there was a server intended mainboard based on the Stoakley chipset that is designed for use in a dual processing unit environment.

Until now, nothing out of the ordinary. The funny part is that this mainboard is coming with an integrated graphics solution as servers need little at this department and the said integrated graphics processor is supplied by no other than Intel's most bitter rival AMD.

Until sometime ago, Intel used integrated graphics chips made by the Canadian graphics company ATI but since ATI and AMD merged into a single entity and since Intel has no server capable integrated graphics chipset, the biggest computer hardware manufacturing in the whole world is using components made by its rival.

The irony does not stop here, as the latest Intel desktop mainboard based on the upcoming X38 chipset that is aimed at the performance market segment only supports CrossFire technology and it is not SLI capable. Again, the CrossFire technology now belongs to AMD as the smaller chip manufacturer also purchased all ATI technology and assets.

The ATI/ AMD graphics processing unit is just for showing 2D images and the general layout of this mainboard is telling us that it is capable of some serious computing power as it comes with two processor slots and lots of random access memory slots. Providing that server integrators would use 2GB DIMMs, this Intel Stoakley motherboard is capable of housing 32GB of system memory, while using 8GB memory modules would rise the total amount of RAM to 128GB.

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