X11 Supermicro and ES CPUs

[TomN]

Hi Everyone,

Been a lurker on this board for a while. Wanted to hear from any other folks that are running ES Intel CPU's on Supermicro boards. I have the following hardware;

Supermicro X11DPH-i motherboard
2x Intel Xeon QL1K ES CPU Platinum 8160 1.8GHz 24 Core LGA 3647 Scalable Processor
2x 32Gig Samsung Ram

I've noticed something. Upgrading to BIOS 3.0c will make the mobo not see the CPU's, it just freezes during POST. Going back to BIOS 2.1 the ES CPU's work again. Any thoughts on this? I thought supermicro boards were the defacto ones to use for ES's? Just wondering if anyone else experienced this where new BIOS version essentially lock out the ES cpu's.

Thanks!

 

[Rand__]

Welcome to the forum.
Best perform a search, there are several threads discussing this very topic & cpu's

 

[TomN]

Welcome to the forum.
Best perform a search, there are several threads discussing this very topic & cpu's

Thanks Rand! I was following some of those threads but I haven't been able to find any concrete work arounds. I've even been reading up on using modified BIOS files to see if we can get over this problem, haven't seen really promising info though.

 

[William]

Its simple, do not update your BIOS if using ES CPU's, downgrading to an older version will fix your problem.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Its simple, do not update your BIOS if using ES CPU's, downgrading to an older version will fix your problem.

The technical reason is probably that there is a limited space in the BIOS for microcode updates for the various steppings of the various supported CPUs, and if anything has to be removed to make space for updates for newly-announced SKUs, it is the microcode for the ES CPUs. Presumably when the microcode update is removed, the CPU is also removed from the list of CPUs the motherboard will accept.

For older boards that needed fixes for Spectre/Meltdown/etc. Supermicro released a utility that replaces one of the BIOS microcode slots with the fixes for the particular CPU that is installed on the board the utility is run on. As an Intel partner, they probably don't want to irritate Intel by releasing that type of utility for ES CPUs which are supposedly not supposed to be running around loose in the wild, for the tiny percentage of mostly-hobbyist customers who are running them.

 

[William]

I believe they are cutting back on ES support in BIOS's, pressure from Intel. I could be wrong tho.

 

[nephri]

What i read somewhere (and maybe wrong), for each chipset Intel publish regularly "supported microcodes".
If a manufacturer like SuperMicro want to release a new bios version, he must include the last set of supported microcodes sent by Intel.
So SuperMicro can't decide which microcodes are supported or not.


In the counterpart, after sometimes, Intel remove microcodes corresponding to ES CPU Stepping because theses processors are for testing purpose and when theses CPU are available on the retail market from a while, it has no more "valid" reason to let anybody to run ES CPU.

That's why Intel removes ES CPU Microcodes sometimes and why, it's preferrable to stick with your bios version when using ES CPU.