Preview : Magny-Cours Powered Boston GP 1120 Server

After waiting a long time to get our hands dirty on the hugely touted

Magny-Cours processor from AMD, we finally got to play around with the help of

our friends in Boston. We received a Magny-Cours based server namely the Boston

GP 1120. We went ahead and fulfilled our hearts desire of playing around with

the Boston server and also in the meanwhile got to understand the capacity and

capabilities of the processor system which boasts of 12 cores and 12 threads of

processing powerhouse. Lets review our findings

The Boston GP 1120 is a 1U rack server based on the Supermicro server

motherboard which has 2 processor slots to be connected to the G34 socket. The

G34 socket can be used to connect 2 AMD Opteron 6174 processor. The server came

populated with two 12 core 12 thread AMD Opteron 6174 processor (2.2 GHz). The

AMD Opteron 6174 is a large 12-core CPU: two dies, each measuring 346mm2

connected by a 24 link Hyper Transport pipe. AMD's Magny-courss Opteron has

almost two billion transistors and 19.6MB of cache on-die. The G34 substrate

features two 45nm dies - each with six cores and private 512K L2 per core,

sharing a 6MB L3 cache per die.The huge number of cores on the machine render it

ideal for virtualization environments where multiple virtual machines can be

operated in parallel.

The board has a total of 16 DIMM slots which can be populated with 256 GB

DDR3 memory units of 16 GB each. However, we received 8 DIMM slots of 4 GB

memory each providing the server 32 GB RAM. Coming to storage, the server came

populated with 4 x 500GB Western Digital Enterprise SATA hard disks in hot-swap

carriers connected with a raid controller making it a total of 2 TB internal

storage. The RAID levels supported are 0, 1, 10. There are LED indicators on the

front panel of the server which aid in basic troubleshooting capabilities by

providing the datacenter admin a basic view of any problem that the server might

be reporting. The server also came populated with a DVD ROM drive. The server is

provided power with the help of 2 hot pluggable PSUs with 650 W max output.

These PSUs can be plugged from the rear of the server. Six hot pluggable

redundant cooling fans keep the server's internals cool. A quick look towards

the rear of the server provides a glimpse of its interconnects. 2 Gigabit LAN

ports and 2 PCI-E x16 slots are provided along with connects for plugging in

mouse, keyboard, monitor. 2 USB 2.0 ports are also provided at the rear of the

server although none at the front could be found.

Bottomline: The specs indeed paint a pretty picture for the Magny-courss powered server. The final verdict, though, will be given when the

performance of this computing beast will be reviewed.

Shikhar Mohan Gupta