14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices recently made the official introduction of its eight-core and 12-core server processors, known as the Opteron 6000 series or Magny-Cours, and now it seems that mothebroard makers are finally nearing the completion of their respective G34 platforms. Gigabyte is one of the first to offer one such mainboard, namely the KGPE-D16. This platform is enabled by the AMD SR5690/SP5100 core logic and has two G34 sockets, which means that, when equipped with two 8-core or 12-core AMD Opteron 6000/6100-series processors, the number of cores will be able to reach 24.
The KGPE-D16 has four PCI express x16 slots, 14 SATA ports and eight 4-channel DDR3 memory slots per CPU. The memory types supported include 1/2/4GB DDR3 800/1066/1333 UDIMM slots with ECC/ non ECC, as well as DDR3 800/1066/1333 RDIMM slots with up to 16GB. The maximum memory achievable is of 64GB (UDIMM) and 256MB (RDIMM). The board also has three Ethernet connectors, an external serial port, a VGA port and a D-Sub output. Finally, the ASUS KGPE-D16 is built with high-quality components that increase system reliability and enable a power efficiency of 85%.
"The KGPE-D16 serverboard supports extreme performance typical in enterprises or institutions with high-performance computing demands or web-facing servers which reach critical processing levels when internet traffic surges," Tom Lin, general manager, ASUS Server Business Unit, said. "So we are pleased that the AMD Opteron 6100 processor and AMD Server Chipset combination provides the muscle to handle these situations."
Through its full support for even the latest Opterons, the mainboard can achieve up to 12MB of shared L3 cache memory and quad HT3 links with an interconnect rate per link of up to 6.4GT/s. It is also optimized for highly threaded applications and, as such, is meant to be used in rack servers and workstations.
"Our longstanding relationship with ASUS helps assure enterprises and research institutions of a tightly integrated serverboard designed to harness the full processing capabilities of the latest AMD Opteron 6100 processors," Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD, said. "The KGPE-D16 is tailored for the requirements needed by end customers to succeed in ever more demanding computing environments."