Investigating Cavium's ThunderX: The First ARM Server SoC With Ambition

The Top of the Line Xeon D: 16 Cores At 2.3 GHz

The Xeon D-1557 is a Xeon D with 12 cores running at 1.8 GHz most of the time (1.5 GHz base clock) that can boost to 2.1 GHz in single threaded circumstances. The reason for the modest clockspeed is simply the relatively low 45W TDP.

So if you need more CPU compute power, Intel has recently launched the Xeon D-1581, which contains 16 cores (32 threads) which can run at 2.3 GHz most of the time (1.8 GHz base), and boosts to 2.4 GHz. It does not seem to be available to everybody quite yet, but it is simply the slightly more powerful version of the earlier 1587, which runs one speed grade slower (1.7-2.3 GHz). Intel has not disclosed pricing yet, but it is not too hard to figure out. The Xeon D-1587 costs a daunting $1754, so it is very likely that the slightly faster Xeon D-1581 is around $1850.

To make the Xeon D-1581 equipped Supermicro X10SDV-7TP8F attractive, Supermicro turned it into a very luxurious board. They added the LSI 2116 RoC chip which adds up to 16 SATA3/SAS2 ports, and an Intel i350-AM4 (4 extra gigabit ports) and an Intel I210 (2 extra gigabit ports). So in total you can attach 4x SATA disks, 16x SAS disks, 6x GigE and 2x 10 GbE connections. Although we are impressed with the I/O capabilities, we feel that the Ethernet configuration is a bit too much of a good thing. If you configured something wrong, the fact that 3 different NIC chips are present makes debugging it harder. Nevertheless, it is an interesting alternative for a large part of the server market that does not need a 2 socket Xeon E5 but still needs a lot of local I/O.