At OCP Summit 2021, Flex and Intel shared the “Bodega Bay” 1OU development platform. This development platform caught my eye since it may look like an Ice Lake platform at first, but it was labeled as an Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids system.
Flex Bodega Bay First Look at an Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids System
At the Flex booth, there was a system simply sitting on the table. This system was labeled as the “Bodega Bay” 1OU Intel Sapphire Rapids Reference platform.
Key specs on that card:
- Based on next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
- 1OU full-width OCP Open Rack v2 and v3 compatible
- Two OCP NIC 3 0 slots
- Two Full-Height Half-Length PCle x16 slots
- Eight E1.S NVMe disks, supports 9.5mm and 15mm modules
- Two M.2 modules on-board
- Two internal PCle x16 expansion slots
- Eight rear-access 4056 fan modules
Based on that, this then is a look at the next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids socket and DIMM slots:
Something that we have had questions come in about, but one can see fairly well here is the PCH situation. The small heatsink above the right CPU and DIMMs is labeled “PCH” and one can see a white SATA port next to it.
Here is an angled view:
We can see sixteen DIMMs per socket with eight white and eight black slots. These DIMMs are labeled in pairs so we have two ChA and two ChB DIMMs and so forth, making this look like an 8-channel configuration per socket. The CPU socket though looks a lot like the LGA4189 socket we detailed in our Installing a 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable LGA4189 CPU and Cooler piece.
On the front of the system, we can see the two PCIe slots and OCP NIC 3.0 slots on either side of the system with eight E1.S slots in the middle. If you want to learn more about E1.S and EDSFF, see our E1 and E3 EDSFF to Take Over from M.2 and 2.5 in SSDs piece.
Here is the rear of the system with eight fan modules along with the bus bar power.
For those that are not familiar, OU is an open compute rack unit and power is delivered to the nodes via a shared bus bar at the back of the system. Cables for NICs and are all at the front of the system and that is what leads to this design.
Final Words
This is the second system we saw labeled at Open Compute Summit 2021 as being a Sapphire Rapids Xeon platform. Previously we saw Samsung show off an Intel Sapphire Rapids PCIe Gen5 Server. It seems like Intel is showing more than in previous years where the CPU sockets and memory slots would be blanked out this far before the launch of the new products.
If you want to learn more about Sapphire Rapids you can see other coverage on STH such as:
- Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon at Hot Chips 33
- Intel Details Sapphire Rapids Xeon at Architecture Day 2021
- Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Expectations Reset to Q2 2022
- Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids Supports HBM and Ponte Vecchio OAM Update
