Trying to figure out what turns out to be an odd corner of the market.
Working on a fairly high-end gadget (that I cannot talk about, sorry). Lots of real-time data flowing through this device. Much of the flow is handled by large FPGAs (and many smaller). My particular interest is in building test rigs, as well as the computing-heart of the device.
This boils down to PCIe lanes - tend to run out quickly. The AMD EPYC chips and motherboards - with their abundance of PCIe lanes - could make this all a lot simpler. If only I could find and buy the boards and CPUs.
To my eye, the Supermicro H12SSL boards look interesting. Likely to drop in one or more FPGA cards with x16 PCIe, maybe an x8 PCIe 4-port Ethernet card, maybe a GPU. This Supermicro board(s) have the room. (Don't need the SAS.)
The test-fixtures are going to go into the lab (with humans) so noisy pre-packaged servers are a non-starter. Plus the hardware guys are going to want the guts exposed, all the time.
For the test fixtures, we need the PCIe lanes, but not much compute. The EPYC 7252 or 7232 would fine. For the heart of the device, an EPYC 75F3 looks interesting - if we could buy the chips.
Can see that eBay, Amazon, Provantage, and Acme(?) at least seem to have the boards. EPYC CPU availability seems rather more scattered. Am I looking in the right places? Is this just an odd end of the market?
(Yeh. Not really expecting an answer, but have to ask. :/ )
Working on a fairly high-end gadget (that I cannot talk about, sorry). Lots of real-time data flowing through this device. Much of the flow is handled by large FPGAs (and many smaller). My particular interest is in building test rigs, as well as the computing-heart of the device.
This boils down to PCIe lanes - tend to run out quickly. The AMD EPYC chips and motherboards - with their abundance of PCIe lanes - could make this all a lot simpler. If only I could find and buy the boards and CPUs.
To my eye, the Supermicro H12SSL boards look interesting. Likely to drop in one or more FPGA cards with x16 PCIe, maybe an x8 PCIe 4-port Ethernet card, maybe a GPU. This Supermicro board(s) have the room. (Don't need the SAS.)
Product Compare | Supermicro
www.supermicro.com
The test-fixtures are going to go into the lab (with humans) so noisy pre-packaged servers are a non-starter. Plus the hardware guys are going to want the guts exposed, all the time.
For the test fixtures, we need the PCIe lanes, but not much compute. The EPYC 7252 or 7232 would fine. For the heart of the device, an EPYC 75F3 looks interesting - if we could buy the chips.
Can see that eBay, Amazon, Provantage, and Acme(?) at least seem to have the boards. EPYC CPU availability seems rather more scattered. Am I looking in the right places? Is this just an odd end of the market?
(Yeh. Not really expecting an answer, but have to ask. :/ )