New board released by Supermicro
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X10SDV-2C-TLN2F, Pentium D 1508 (2C4T, 25W TDP), with 2 x 1GbE LAN, not sure why named "Pentium" but it has all Xeon properties/features
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-2C-TLN2F.cfmX10SDV-4C-TLN4F, Xeon D 1518 (4C8T, 35W TDP), with 2 x 1GbE (i350) + 2 x 10GbE LAN (via SoC)
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-4C_-TLN4F.cfmLooking at Intel D1508 specifications, the reference price is just about 2/3 of D1520, and D1518 is almost the same as D1520 but with lower TDP and it's really designed for embedded application.
To me, the D1508 platform would be quite interesting, current price for their lower end D1520 boards are selling around US$500, so I am expecting this to be around US$400, would be competitive when compared with Xeon E3 + mobo option.
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If the road map for pfSense 3.0 will be surely right and Intels DPDK is used to speed up the whole Layer3
packet forwarding it should be good to know that there are more then one type of that boards. There are
two main types as I am informed, one is using the "Storage Performance Development Kit" (SPDK) and this
are then storage accelerated SKUs and the other one is using the "Data Plane Development Kit" (DPDK) that
is matching then the Xeon D-15x8 named SKUs. So if this became true it will be a really cool device that is
from the lowest bottom to the highest top serving nearly many more fields then the former Intel Atom C2000
platform named "Rangeley". In the past I was thinking of that the network accelerated is meaning Intel QAT
but this is not supported by that Xeon D-15x8 platform. But now are PCIe cards available to buy and insert
so that can be solved. Here is a full SuperMicro Xeon D-1500 product and platform overview if wanted.
Supermicro Intel Xeon D-15xx based boardsso I am expecting this to be around US$400, would be competitive when compared with Xeon E3 + mobo option.
No at all, if some one is pressed to go by PPPoE he is better of to go with an Intel Xeon E3-12xxv3 @3,7GHz
as there will be counting more the single core performance and CPU frequency over the multi-core CPU usage.Here are some tests from the STH over both Xeon D-15xx platforms from Supermicro.
INTEL XEON D-15×8 NETWORKING ACCELERATED SKUS
INTEL XEON D-1500 STORAGE ACCELERATED SKUS -
Well those are not really new. I posted about it a while ago. I was actually looking at getting the 1518. I wasn't sure what the best vendor would be. I've found it on these sites so far:
WiredZone
ServersDirect
I don't usually buy server stuff so I wasn't really sure where to get it.The whole Quickassist thing seems to really be a mess. I was thrown off by this product brief. Quick Assist Technology(QAT) isn't actually built into Xeon Ds. Now Intel is treating QAT as though it is meant to offload crypto networking from the CPU as opposed to part of the CPU instruction set like with Rangeley. However, the DPDK you mentioned is what the Atom Rangeley and Xeon D-15x8 variants are built on, and it has most of the instructions sets for handling cryptographic and other networking functions. The difference is it will be handled by the CPU, although the CPU will handle it more easily with specific instruction sets.
Like the E5s, you can use the Quickassist adapter with the Xeon D-15x8 to offload those compute cycles instead, but that would only make sense to do in specific server situations where the cost of that adapter would make sense. The adapter cost as much as the motherboard and CPU because it is enterprise hardware, but those would be cheaper and use less power than the E5 so I guess it would have an application somewhere. I guess the gist of it is that the 15x8 still have networking and crypto specific instructions sets that were previously only part of QAT. They can also work with a QAT accelerator which only the expensive E5s could do before. I don't know why Intel handled it that way though.
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Yes I know about that. But at the time you post, there isn't Pentium 1508, not sure why this is not even included in Intel's announcement (also the naming is a bit confusing)