Comments on: ASRock Rack ALTRAD8U-1L2T is a mATX Motherboard for up to 128 Cores

By: Bruce Abbott

Bruce Abbott — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 16:32:18 +0000

This board is spec’d perfectly for my needs. You could throw this in SilverStone’s new RM600 case, because very few single-socket (SS) boards can take advantage of its 6U configuration (e.g., 3.5″ 12-bay, 3 GPUs, etc.). My RM400 is max’d out and a SS board like the ALTRAD8u would be perfect (mmm…oculink), especially considering the DAS opportunity with SlimSAS. Thanks for covering this, Patrick!

By: emerth

emerth — Tue, 30 May 2023 17:53:45 +0000

I hope it goes retail or at least channel. This is maybe the first “normal” mainboard for ARM I’ve seen. ARM is real in the hyperscalar datacenters where bespoke form factors are acceptable, the rest of the world needs something more standardized.

By: Patrick Kennedy

Patrick Kennedy — Tue, 30 May 2023 14:36:46 +0000

In reply to spuwho. I have been heavily campaigning for this to go retail at Computex.

By: spuwho

spuwho — Tue, 30 May 2023 04:13:16 +0000

I doubt this board will go retail. Like Gigabyte and Marvell with the ThunderX, it will be limited to the integrator market where the volumes support the model. Ampere is in no way interested to get into the retail markets and will stick to the OEM’s (like they did with Lenovo).

If you get a review sample, great (Ampere is pretty good about that) but I doubt you will see this board in the channel. It will be available through some integrator that specializes in engineering or HPC clients.

By: David

David — Mon, 29 May 2023 08:04:47 +0000

@Carl highly recommend scouring classifieds sites for Point-of-Sale (POS) systems as they almost always come with small monitors that have VGA inputs and often an additional bonus of being touch enabled. In a perfect world you want to have something made by ELO.

So we have motherboards, now we only need the actual CPUs available in retail channels.

By: Broadband

Broadband — Mon, 29 May 2023 01:32:18 +0000

Is any mainboard like this for single Intel or AMD too? I wonder Ampere Altra can install WIndows Server or Porxmox for Virtualization…