Supermicro A1SAI-2750F-O Recently, there has been a buzz in the industry about the new Supermicro A1SAI-2750F mini-itx motherboard. Supermicro has always been at the edge of the server market, catering to industrial PC builders and enthusiastic hobbyist alike. Now, the sever board manufacturer has introduced the Intel Atom C2750F 8-Core mini-itx motherboard. Casetronic is a solutions provider for mini-itx form factor, and you can see how this has got us excited. There are motherboards in Supermicro’s lineup that run from workstation boards to consumer focused boards, but Supermicro has always been the to-go manufacturer for most of our server configurations. When we saw the powerful motherboard out in the market, most of us needed to have our jaws scraped off the floor. Never before has anyone here thought that there would be anything coming out from an Intel Atom chipset that pushed more than a dual core processor. Indeed, the A1SAI-2750F is a powerful component and one especially liked by our testers. Currently, we have found an ASRock embedded C2750D4I motherboard with the same chipset and surely many more to come. But what we like most about the Supermicro board is the quality factor. This platform makes it an ideal partner for networking appliance or web server node building block. The Intel Atom Avoton C2750 processor boasts an 8-Core CPU at only 20W. This powerhouse is as fast as a Haswell i3 chipset using less than half the power. It even beats the Intel Xeon E3 in power consumption while sustaining similar applications. The motherboard is densely packed and you can find the Marvell Ethernet transceiver which would very well explain the high pricing. Although it is a compact mini-itx form factor, this small board has the makings of an efficient server board. You can find four DDR3 SO-DIMM slots up to 32GB, four network ports with one dedicated IPMI LAN port, and one PCI-Express 2.0 x8 slot. As is customary with mini-itx solutions, scalability is limited when compared to a full size ATX thus making this board more of a low end server workstation component. Other features include front access USB 3.0 connectors, an internal Type-A USB 3.0 header, six SATA3/SATA2 ports for all your storage needs, and interestingly a Molex connector for a directly powered hard drive. Supermicro has included legacy VGA and COM ports along with four USB 3.0/2.0 connectors on the IO. Not surprisingly, the supply of Intel Avoton is still constrained but here’s to hoping that will change soon. Nevertheless, this chipset is set to revolutionize the computing industry. Some applications we would recommend this to our clients would be microserver sized deployments, storage server and low end firewall/pbx appliance. We have been waiting for a readily accessible high core count architecture that allows fast paced networking while maintaining low power consumption. Guess what folks, it’s here!
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 17:45:17 +0000