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.
Price: Rs 299,000 INR inc VAT ( 1 year |
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