Does anyone’ have insight into the really strange lack of availability of these SP6 motherboards (relative to the CPUs)?
The cpus appear to be in stock and in plentiful supply at MSRP at various USA based e-tailers, but I can’t find a single motherboard listed (not even listed for pre-order, or ‘coming soon”).
There are ATX mboards announced; Tyan has the Tomcat HX S8040 (S8040GM4NE-2T) and Asrock Rack the SIENAD8-2LT.
I’m really happy to see the availability of all the CPUs - especially the 8,16 and 24 core) - but don’t understand the motherboard situation…
Have not seen the Tyan yet.
Asrock is still preliminary, so is that nifty SP6 board from Asus (S14NA-U12.
Gigabyte’s Boards seem to actually be released and I could order them from a Distributor here in Germany for ~700 Euros plus VAT for example for the following model:
I’m looking into that platform myself right now, either Epyc Siena or Intel Sapphire Rapids depending on the performance / platform cost.
Last time I checked the Siena boards from AsRock Rack had “preliminary” tag. So don’t expect them in retail in the near future. Might take a couple months for them to trickle down into retail. First boards always go to large customers or to AsRocks own barebones.
Seems like a more feature complete board with 2DPC and lots of PCIe slots. I guess the AsRock board will be a bit cheaper. So more or less the same as standard server boards.
And what is that AsRock board with 8 DIMM slots and Siena 6-channel memory? What kind of setup is this supposed to be? Seems wierd
I’m really excited…I’d like to get my hands on one of those boards. See how those MCIO ports work with U.3 drives. PCIe 5.0 x 8 port sounds great. 10x U.3 drives without touching a single PCIe slot…
Let’s see when those boards hit the stores of Mindfactory, Senetic, Jacob or other usual suspects. I don’t have accounts with wholesellers nor am I vorsteuerabzugsberechtigt So I have to stick to the stores for plebs
It’s speculation, but the AsrockRack LGA 4677 (Sapphire Rapids) Board is ~150 Euros cheaper than the one from Gigabyte at the moment and the differences seem similar to the two Siena Boards.
With Genoa, DIY parts became available 4 months after oem systems started shipping.
It is still a good idea to do diy though. I have $3.5k of new money plus $600 of old parts in my genoa build. The equivalent system is over $20k from dell.
I wrote something on the differences between different w790 motherboards for the sapphire rapids cpu for someone looking into server hardware for the first time.
My favorite so far is the 2L2Q from AsRock. The ASUS board is very similar , but lacks 2x1G LAN which is important to me. Gigabyte ME03-PE0 with the 7 PCIe slots is really nice too (two instances of 16/0 or 8/8 split across 4 slots. I like that) but I rather get more MCIO.
Nothing in retail yet…I’d like to build a new server during christmas holidays. Siena CPUs are available here, but only selected SKUs. Let’s wait and see
With AsRock Rack also stating “preliminary”, I suspect general availability for most boards to be Q1 '24. These boards aren’t required to ship by christmas…
I hate to wait, but I can squeeze some more budget and planning out of my build with ~3 months lead time.
I saw Supermicro having boards too, but they seem very custom form factors for their own and OEM products. Not much general use (yet) from Supermicro.
Yeah I’ve seen multiple stores listing Gigabyte boards both in € and in $ space. Early bird catches the worm? I’m waiting for AsRock and ASUS…Pegatron apparently isn’t that quick to build and ship them.
I’m not sure if those form-factors have a high demand…but we’re talking about edge after all and everything is a bit different and smaller.
I’ve got an Epyc 8224P running on a Gigabyte ME03-PE0 now. So far nothing but a positive experience with that board. The newer Gigabyte BMC Software is amazing and it’s worth pointing out it came with the MCIO Cable in the Box even though I bought the bulk variant (YMMV)
I’m still waiting on AsRock/ASUS for the boards. I’m probably going with 8224 as well, but I may drop down to 8124, not sure yet. 8224 is a nice sweet spot before the huge extra charge for the 32-core.
MCIO → 8x SATA breakout is really nice. And it’s not some cheap SATA cable either.
Did you buy the stuff at CTT? CPU SKUs get more available now in retail as well as the Gigabyte boards.
I really don’t want to buy PCIe cards if I can just plug the U.3 in on-board connectors. But I’m getting a bit impatient too. And “yeah it’s great” doesn’t make the situation any better
Is there Bifurcation support for all slots on your board? Especially those x8/x8 slots are interesting to me…2x x4 on each x8 would be kinda nice.
It is useful when you are doing the initial setup.
Depending on the board there is usually only 2 or 4 other usb ports sometimes on the same controller. The second usb header is usually on an independent controller.
Board has 2x USB 3.2 Gen1 at rear IO.
With IPMI, I don’t plan to ever use any USB. Media inject, HTML5 KVM, let’s go. And the 2xUSB at the rear IO is nice to have just in case. I like front USB to plug in some Yubikey or similar utility.
And if you got 7 PCIe slots, USB brackets come at a hefty cost of 8-16 lanes
So I have to stick to the stores for plebs 
