News Jam 80 Cores, 768GB of RAM into E-ATX Case With This Tiny Board

[Admin]

Ad's COM-HPC Ampere Altra Module has up to 80 cores, 768 GB of DRAM.

Jam 80 Cores, 768GB of RAM into E-ATX Case With This Tiny Board : Read more

 

[mikewinddale]

What's the purpose of making a module that plugs into a motherboard? Why not just make a normal motherboard?

Does this facilitate upgrades? E.g., a new module that supports new CPUs and new RAM, but plugs into the old motherboard with the old PCIe cards?

 

[domih]

What's the purpose of making a module that plugs into a motherboard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM-HPC

PICMG | Open Standards for Embedded Computing Applications

PICMG is a consortium of companies who collaboratively develop open standards for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications.

www.picmg.org

Not for the "regular" PC users. Think industrial/science workstations for instance.

Costs $$$$$

 

[escksu]

What's the purpose of making a module that plugs into a motherboard? Why not just make a normal motherboard?

Does this facilitate upgrades? E.g., a new module that supports new CPUs and new RAM, but plugs into the old motherboard with the old PCIe cards?

Its not for end-user PCs. COM-HPC are mainly for industrial servers/embedded etc....

I guess the whole idea is to have a carrier board + modules. This way you can have any carrier board and any module. There will be no such thing as Intel or AMD board since the chipset and socket resides on the module instead of the board. So, you can simply swap out the module for something else. We don't need it for home PCs but industrial or specialised machines will be quite useful. This concept of putting CPU on a separate card/module has been around for ages, but pple rarely know about them because they are not for home/office use.

 

[PapaCrazy]

What's the purpose of making a module that plugs into a motherboard? Why not just make a normal motherboard?

Does this facilitate upgrades? E.g., a new module that supports new CPUs and new RAM, but plugs into the old motherboard with the old PCIe cards?

This is being marketed as a development platform for ARM, so I think the goal is to have full access to an ARM server environment (not just virtualized, but hardware-based) within x86. If the goal was just to market an ARM server, I imagine they could have stuck the SOC within a tiny chassis and called it a day.

Good question, not sure if this can be treated as a PCIe card, since they marketing the system as a whole there may be more involved to sync the soc with mainboard.

Edit: Nevermind, I thought this slotted into an x86 system as a PCIe board, I didn't realize it interfaces through the socket.

I really can't see the benefit of this design, besides cost savings.