ASRock Rack W480D4U W-1200

[ReturnedSword]

Surprised no one posted about this yet.

ASRock Rack shared a press release about their upcoming W480D4U board. This is a W-1200 series workstation board, but it also has a BMC (ASPEED AST2500). Quick visual look since details are a bit thin at this point has the W480D4U looking quite similar to the already announced Z490D4U-2L2T. It's possible that the two boards share the same basic design, since the W480 is really just a Comet Lake-W workstation variant of the Z490 Comet Lake-S desktop chipset.

Looks like the Xeon E will be dying an early death, since at this point it's still hard to obtain Xeon E or Xeon E Refresh parts outside of the OEM channel. Comet Lake-W seems more in-line with Coffee Lake-E/Coffee Lake-E Refresh, possibly utilizing a LCC core arrangement (up to 10 cores per die) instead of HCC or XCC like Skylake-W Xeon W-2100.

On another note, Comet Lake-S i3 CPUs don't seem to have ECC support according to ARK, which is a huge bummer as this would've been perfect for a current gen light server. I really wished AMD would step up their game and release a re-spin of their consumer chipsets for this market. Even if Ryzen Pro is needed for "official" ECC support it would be great. Unfortunately it seems that this market segment is rather small.

 

[SDLeary]

The articles that I have read have made it sound like the E's are going to be the server parts; so there is the possibility that this is just a re-badging of the workstation parts in a bifurcation of the line that was already there.

 

[ReturnedSword]

It seems rather strange to bifurcate the segment in this way since the core counts between E-2100/2200 and W-1200 are basically the same aside from the new 10 core SKU. Perhaps Intel has the resources to demarcate the two lines but IMHO the W-1200 core counts on the lower end are too few for HEDT workstations.

 

[SDLeary]

It seems rather strange to bifurcate the segment in this way since the core counts between E-2100/2200 and W-1200 are basically the same aside from the new 10 core SKU. Perhaps Intel has the resources to demarcate the two lines but IMHO the W-1200 core counts on the lower end are too few for HEDT workstations.

I haven't seen them described as HEDT; I've seen them described as Entry or Light (the term AsrockRack uses) workstations. AFAICT simply higher end Core parts with ECC added.

I think this is possibly something to simply avoid what happened with the last batch came out. Didn't they have two releases for the E's last time... one for Server and one for Workstation?

SDLeary