First AMD G34 boards spotted
The race to Magny Cours
by Charlie Demerjian
June 1, 2009
ON THE VERY day of the AMD Istanbul launch, what does the green team from Austin do? They show off not one but two Socket G34 boards for the next generation Magny Cours parts.
Quanta G34 board
The first one is from Quanta, and it is pretty normal looking. There are 16 DDR3 DIMM slots, and two sockets. Notice the two Broadcom chips on the left, the board wasn't labeled, but those do look to be 10 Gig Ethernet. 24 cores and lots of memory, what more could you ask for?
Inventec G34 HPC board
Funny you should ask, how about 24 cores and 24 DDR3 DIMMs? That is what Inventec brings to market with the HPC board pictured above. It looks like there are two fiber NICs on the top right, but the board was too high up on the wall to get a close look.
Two interesting things that do show up are the riser slots and power. There are two PCIe looking slots above the CPUs that simply scream out riser card. The other bit is in the top left corner, two very non-standard power connectors. Together, they shout out that this will be sold in a barebones configuration, but since they don't officially exist, we can't say for sure.
In any case, having boards out this early is a very good sign Magny Cours is nothing technically new, just two Istanbuls on an MCM. This means quick time to market, but likely longer OEM validation. In any case, the hardware is looking good for a timely launch.S|A
File under Servers and Microprocessors
