Gigabyte shows off Cavium Thunder ARM servers

CES 2016: We can’t explain ARM servers at CES but there they were

Cavium logoGigabyte’s OEM arm was showing off some Cavium servers at CES of all places. While SemiAccurate is glad to see new datacenter products anywhere, we were a bit surprised to see them at CES.

There are four Cavium Thunder 88xx based servers from Gigabyte, two of which were shown off at CES. Those are the 1U R150-T60 pictured below and the 2U R270-T60 not pictured below. Also not pictured or shown at CES are the four node 2U H270-T70 and the 1U 1S R120-T30. The two shown off all have variants with 3.5″ or 2.5″ drive bays, the R120 is 3.5″ only, and the H270 is 2.5″ only.

Gigabyte Cavium Thunder ARM servers

The smaller 2U R150 server is pretty beefy

All of these have some common features around I/O namely 40GbE provided by an Inphi Cortina CS4343 controller. The R270 has 2x40GbE per node as does the R120, the other two have 3x40GbE per server plus 4x10GbE All four have a GbE link to the Aspeed AST2400 management controller too, something that comes in handy if you don’t want a long stroll through your datacenter.

Expansion slots vary, as do PSUs but they are all at least 80 PLUS Gold rated. For memory each socket has eight DDR4 DIMM slots in quad-channel configuration that support up to DDR4/2400 or enough for most uses. In short these are pretty massive boxes that can stuff up to 384 cores and 8x40GbE ports in a 2U configuration. If you need more than that you are going to have to do things the old-fashioned way, buy a few servers and some duct tape.S|A

The following two tabs change content below.

Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate