the beast
Earlier this week I acquired a prototype motherboard from one of the top tier server/workstation motherboard companies. A number of things made this mobo unique or special:
* Intel Tylersburg chipset
* Two Intel LGA 771 sockets
* Ten (yes, 10) PCI-E gen2 slots
* Ten (yes, 10) DDR3 memory slots
I was provided with two Intel Xeon X5460 (Quad core) 3.16GHz CPUs, and 24GB(6x4GB DDR3) of RAM. The plan was to hook up at least 2 S1070 units. Unfortunately, this beast wasn't remotely stable. I managed to get Fedora10-x86_64 (after RHEL5 refused to even detect the onboard NIC) installed, but the system refused to POST reliably. Sometimes no USB devices were detected (which is kind of a problem when it has no PS/2 ports for a keyboard). Other times, the SATA disk never got detected, which is an even bigger problem. Even worse, sometimes it just hung randomly during POST. I managed to test drive it with one S1070, and it seemed to work ok. Unfortunately, it just wasn't stable enough to use for anything productive.