Intel Scalable Processor Family Products from ASRock Rack

ASRock Rack has been pursuing the server space in earnest for several generations. With the release of the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family, new ASRock Rack motherboards and systems are here to service next-gen servers.

ASRock Rack Intel Xeon Scalable Systems

In terms of storage, ASRock Rack is bucking the trend of 12-16 bay 1U storage servers with embedded CPUs and is putting dual Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs in a 1U storage server design the ASRock Rack 1U12L C622 family.

In this generation, ASRock Rack is even adding eight DIMMs per CPU for up to 1TB RAM capacity. That is a considerable compute and memory footprint for this class of device.

ASRock Rack also has a number of half-width solutions that can be used in multiple nodes per chassis designs. We wanted to highlight one design that is particularly interesting.

The ASRock Rack EP2C622D24HM has a full set of 6x DDR4 DIMM slots per CPU and 12 in total. To achieve this density, ASRock Rack has half of the DIMMs on the reverse side.

ASRock Rack Intel Xeon Scalable Motherboards

The ASRock Rack motherboard line for the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors has two main focuses. There are two motherboards that are designed as half-width servers, one example we already covered. Others are standard width offerings.

For a standard form factor motherboard, the ASRock Rack EP2C622D12NM-4L focuses on expandability with a plethora of PCIe x16, m.2, and OCP mezzanine card slots.

For a lower-end segment of the market, the ASRock Rack EPC621D8A is a single socket solution with 8 DIMMs. The board has an array of expansion slots and a full 14x SATA exposed.

We do wish that the company would have used the Intel C622 chipset for some low-cost 10GbE. Otherwise, this looks like an excellent single socket platform.

In this generation, ASRock Rack is relying heavily upon OCP mezzanine cards for high-speed expansion. We like this change as it aligns with an industry standard.