Supermicro Launches 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable and DCPMM Support

At the Supermicro 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable launch, you may have seen a familiar face. I heard through the grapevine that Supermicro was holding a virtual launch event on April 3, 2019 for the newest Intel Xeon CPUs as well as Intel Optane DCPMM. Since at STH we have the broadest set of server reviews, including many from Supermicro, I agreed to give an overview of the platform for Supermicro.

Supermicro Launches 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Support with Optane DCPMM

Supermicro makes a wide variety of servers based on the Intel Xeon Scalable platform. You may have seen some of our Supermicro Intel Xeon Scalable reviews in pieces including:

• Supermicro SYS-2049U-TR4 Review A 4P 2U Xeon Scalable Server
• Supermicro SuperStorage SSG-5029P-E1CTR12L 2U Storage Server Review
• Supermicro X11DAC Workstation and Server Motherboard Review
• Supermicro X11DPi-N E-ATX Motherboard Review
• Supermicro X11DAi-N Workstation and Server Motherboard Review
• Supermicro X11DPi-NT E-ATX Motherboard Review
• Supermicro X11SPH-nCTF ATX Storage Motherboard Review

Following on the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launch, Supermicro announced support for the new platforms, including Intel Optane DCPMM. Going back to our key tenants of the Intel launch the benefits of this new generation are:

1. More cores in the mainstream part of the SKU stack at the same price points
2. Almost all SKUs in the stack have minor clock speed bumps and thus performance improvements accompanying the core count increases
3. Similar clock-for-clock IPC performance as the first generation
4. Memory speeds and capacities have increased, now to a maximum of DDR4-2933 speeds and 256GB LRDIMM support
5. Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module support (DCPMM) for persistent, high-capacity, high-performance modules in DDR4 sockets
6. New hardware security mitigations and fixes for the side channel/ speculative execution families of vulnerabilities, e.g. Spectre/ Meltdown and L1TF
7. Intel DL Boost using the new VNNI instruction to allow faster AI inferencing without GPUs

As part of the Supermicro virtual launch event, I did a short segment highlighting these updates using a 1U Supermicro SYS-1029U from the company’s “Ultra” line of servers:

Note, agreeing to do the video, I stipulated that I wanted my segment to post on STH but you can find the entire webcast launch event online.

For customers, especially in the high-volume Intel Xeon Silver 4200, Xeon Gold 5200, and Xeon Gold 6200 segments, the added cores, and clock speed can mean 20-40% more performance at the same price point. Features like hardware security mitigations and DL Boost have the potential to increase that further based on workload. Intel Optane DCPMM is a new memory technology that we are seeing intense interest for given its unique properties as persistent and relatively high capacity in the DRAM channels.

Final Words

Supermicro, like other major Intel partners, is supporting refreshed CPUs and the new Intel Optane DCPMM memory technology. In the next week, we will have a review of an innovative Supermicro 2U4N BigTwin platform that shows how Supermicro is designing platforms to take full advantage of the new processor family and Intel Optane DCPMM. Stay tuned for more on STH.