AMD EPYC for ATX Workstations: GIGABYTE MZ01-CE0 & MZ01-CE1 Motherboards
AMD's EPYC processor has made it into servers and supercomputers, yet it still has to find its place inside workstations. To a large degree that is because up until recently there were no motherboards for these CPUs on the market. ASRock Rack was first to showcase such a mainboard at Computex. Now, GIGABYTE is coming up not with one, but with two ATX mobos for AMD's EPYC aimed at workstations.
GIGABYTE's lineup of ATX motherboards for AMD's EPYC consists of two motherboards, the MZ01-CE0 and MZ01-CE1. Both feature a socket for AMD's EPYC, four PCIe x16 slots (as expected from a CPU that has 64 128 spare PCIe lanes) compatible with dual-slot graphics cards and accelerators, a PCIe x8 slot, eight DDR4 slots supporting up to 1 TB of DDR4 ECC memory, an M.2 slot for SSDs, and four SlimSAS ports for up to 16 SATA storage devices.
Despite being ATX-compatible, the two motherboards from GIGABYTE can be used to build both workstations as well as servers. The MZ01-CE0 and MZ01-CE1 platforms come equipped with Aspeed's AST2500 BMC for remote management as well as GIGABYTE's Server Management software.
Both MZ01-CE0 and MZ01-CE1 motherboards come equipped with two onboard Intel I210 GbE LAN controllers. Meanwhile, the MZ01-CE0 is also outfitted with two extra 10 GbE Base-T LAN ports (controlled by the Intel X550 chip) for those who have appropriate networks for transferring large files from one system to another (something quite common in movie industry, for example).
GIGABYTE has not touched upon MSRPs of its EPYC-supporting motherboards because they will be available mostly to B2B customers. Meanwhile, being unique products for server CPUs and equipped with expensive network controllers, the MZ01-CE0 and MZ01-CE1 will certainly carry premium price tags.
| GIGABYTE's ATX Motherboards for AMD EPYC CPUs | ||
| MZ01-CE0 | MZ01-CE1 | |
| Supported CPUs | AMD Socket 4094 AMD EPYC processors with up to 32 cores and 180 W TDP | |
| PCH | AMD | |
| Graphics | Aspeed's AST2500 BMC 4 i- PCIe 3.0 x16 slot | |
| Display Outputs | 1 i- D-Sub | |
| Memory | 8 i- DDR4 DIMM Up to 1 TB of DDR4 with ECC | |
| Slots for Add-In-Cards | 4 i- PCIe 3.0 x16 1 i- PCIe 3.0 x8 | |
| Ethernet | LAN 1: Intel I210AT GbE PHY LAN 2: Intel I210AT GbE PHY LAN 3: Intel X550 10 GbE PHY LAN 4: Intel X550 10 GbE PHY MLAN: Realtek RTL8211E | LAN 1: Intel I210AT GbE PHY LAN 2: Intel I210AT GbE PHY MLAN: Realtek RTL8211E |
| Storage | M.2 | 1 i- M.2-22110 (PCIe 3.0 x4) |
| SATA | 16 i- SATA 6 Gbps via four SlimSAS ports | |
| Audio | none | |
| USB | 2 i- USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A | |
| Serial Ports | 2 i- internal COM port | |
| Other I/O | 1 i- TPM header (some SKUs come with pre-installed TPM) 2 i- internal USB Type-A (for front panel) | |
| Monitoring | CPU Temperature Fan RPM | |
| Management | GIGABYTE Server Management (GSM) Aspeed AST2500 management controller Avocent MergePoint IPMI 2.0 web interface | |
| Compatibility | Windows Server 2012 R2 (x64) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.4 Ubuntu 16.04 VMware ESXi 6.5 | |
| Form-Factor | ATX (305 mm i- 244 mm | 12" i- 9.6") |
Related Reading:
- ASRock Rack Goes AMD: EPYCD8 Workstation Motherboard
- Oracle puts AMD EPYC in the Cloud
- iBASE Unveils FWA8800: AMD EPYC Embedded-Based Network Appliance
- Cray Adds AMD EPYC Processors to CS500 Cluster Supercomputers
- More EPYC Servers: Dell Launches 1P and 2P PowerEdge for HPC and Virtualization
- Microsoft Announces Azure VMs with Dual 32-core AMD EPYC CPUs
- HPE Unveils ProLiant DL385 Gen10: Dual Socket AMD EPYC
Source: GIGABYTE