GIGABYTE Server, the enterprise and embedded branch of Gigabyte’s consumer brand, has released the specifications for its MA10-ST0 motherboard, complete with Intel Atom C3958 SoC (System on a Chip). This is remarkable since this is the first sighting of this SoC, which is a Denverton-family CPU that has only been revealed as a dual-core C3338 with a 1.5 GHz base clock and 2.2 GHz boost clock.
So what does this C3958 SoC get you ? A 31W TDP for starters, which the afformentioned 16 cores running at 2.0 GHz and potentially an unknown boost clock and 16MB of L2 cache. With support up to 128GB of ECC Registered DDR4-2400, you’ll be sure to able to spec out quite the server applications with this platform.
The GIGABYTE Server MA10-ST0 board complements this with two 10Gb/s SFP+ connections and three 1Gb/s RJ45 ports of which one is the dedicated management port for remote administration. More typically for server environments is the four Mini-SAS ports that allow to split up to sixteen (!) SATA 6Gb/s ports. Two of the mini-SAS ports are shared with the PCIe 3.0 x8 slot, which typically is used for a RAID or HBA card for storage expansion.
Combined with for instance a Silverstone DS380 case and some Mini-SAS to SATA cables, you could have eight hot-swappable 3,5″ HDDs along with a PCIe card for various use cases, or expand it with four 2,5″ internal drives like SSD read/write cache to get those 10Gb/s ports filled up. Specs and more info: GIGABYTE Server
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