I prefer MCIO as it promises less signaling issues connecting to cable-connected U2/3 devices compared to PCIe-Adapter-cable connections.
I want 12 DDR5 slots to maximize memory bandwidth, but not 24 (as fully populated data rates drop to 3600)
While I only have 10Gb and 40/56Gb switches right now, 25Gb NICs onboard seem like a good option for future expansion
Now here is my question: Looking at the server products all offer 24 ram slots, which means that all of these seem to use a different motherboard than the one they’re selling separately.
Other vendors (e.g. Supermicro) typically develop server lines and decide to sell components (chassis, motherboard, etc.) separately for replacement and upgrade purposes.
Anyone with insights to this seemingly weird strategy on ASUS’s part?
I ended up getting one of these B2B ASUS boards because they were the only server boards offering overclocking-like features of “Core Optimizer” and “Engine Boost” which actually did boost my memory bandwidth numbers quiet substantially over the features turned off.
Gigabyte does the same thing with Gigabyte B2B, Asrock has Asrock Rack and MSI has MSI Enterprise Platform Solutions.
I was also interested in that motherboard (K14PA-U12), but I had to reject it from consideration because they’ve declined to support Turin.
It’s pretty unfortunate, as otherwise it looked like the best SP5 motherboard for my purposes. Providing a ton of MCIO ports is way better than PCIe slots blocked by DIMM slots (Gigabyte) or throwing like half the lanes away (Supermicro).
On the other hand, maybe it’s better this way… it’s an Asus product, and I’ve been told that the support for their “enterprise” level gear isn’t any better than for the consumer stuff. Not supporting 9005 definitely isn’t a good sign in that area.
Is there a technical reason for this? Asus seems to be the only one doing this with SP5.
I know alot of the SP3 EPYC motherboards didn’t support support all generations of EPYC, but I think that was due to PCIe generations changing.
I assume that this is due to Turin having up to 500W TDP and Genoa only 400W TDP. Either you exclude half of the Turin line from support (does not look good) or you simply don’t support Turin at all.
Considered making this a requirement as well, but it dawned on me that an upgrade to Turin (to me) requires a new set of RAM sticks (6400MT) and a new CPU, both outprice the mobo by a wide margin (at least for the time being). So instead I settled on a mobo without upgrade path.
According to its manual Supermicro H13SSL only supports Turin starting revision 2.00, and only supports DDR5-6400 starting with revision 2.01 (p.31f).
So, maybe it’s not the TDP, but other specs of the Turin platform that require a rework of motherboards.
Apparently because ASUS lowballed the Flash ROM size by using only a 16 MiB chip. I think this also happened a few times with Supermicro and AsRock Rack boards where the new PCB revision only difference is that it has a bigger chip. So you would need to maintain two different BIOS images to support both Processor lines.