SFF.Network iBase MBN806, the First AMD Snowy Owl Motherboard to Appear in the Wild

iBase, a Taiwan based networking and embedded motherboard and system manufacturer, seems to be the first company to market with AMD's Snowy Owl platform. As a reminder, AMD's Snowy Owl is the embedded version of EPYC, AMD's datacentre processor range.

Read more here.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,827
4,902
AMD keeps putting up the pressure on so many markets on Intel like I've never seen. I'd guess they have gotten the full go-ahead from investors with their support because this is not playing it safe at all. I'm glad it's working with competing products in all those markets.
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
Odd that they're branding it under EPYC when it's a single Zeppelin die, making it effectively a BGA Ryzen Pro. Certainly a smaller form-factor than a PGA chip in an AM4 socket though.
As a Xeon-D competitor it lacks the built-in networking capacity that makes Xeon-D so popular. Once you add in dual/quad 10GbE cards, that eats into the available PCIe lanes. Will be interesting to see how it fares against Xeon D in performance where AMD do not have a core-count advantage, particularly if QAT gains traction.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,827
4,902
Even though Xeon D has the 10GbE on the SoC to best the "small EPYC", it's clearly a marketing and positioning move to name it EPYC. Personally I think it's the correct choice, I regard Ryzen Pro as light workstation and office PC CPUs while EPYC is a server-market product. To me the placement is better.