Intel X710-AT2 and X710-TM4 Carlsville NICs

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zir_blazer

Active Member
Dec 5, 2016
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Casually looking around Intel ARK, I found these two NICs, which are not mentioned anywhere else, perhaps because they are still too new. The controllers I'm talking about are these:
Intel product specifications

Carlsville seems to be a newer version of 2014 Fortville, as they have around the same 10G capabilities. What makes them attractive is their price, at 72 and 135 U$D, respectively.
There is even a Data Sheet for them circulating around, where I got their capabilities of. The X710-AT2 includes two 10G MACs with integrated 10GBASE-T PHYs, so they can output Ethernet Ports directly. The X710-TM4 is significantly different, since it has 4 10G, two with the same 10GBASE-T PHYs, and the other two which uses 10GBASE-KR/SFI PHYs, intended to go to a SFP+ Port. They can also use external 10GBASE-T PHYs so you can have 4 of those.

I suppose that these should be appearing soon. I found weird that some recent Supermicro Motherboards decided to include Broadcom as 10G NICs instead of Intel X550. What I'm curious is why they weren't mentioned anywhere.
 
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EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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If it makes you feel any better, I was surprised and happy to see a copper-based ethernet solution based on the X710 chip but I've refrained from opening the bubbly until Patrick gets his hands on some and lets us know what the power savings are like over the X550...
 

zir_blazer

Active Member
Dec 5, 2016
355
128
43
If it makes you feel any better, I was surprised and happy to see a copper-based ethernet solution based on the X710 chip but I've refrained from opening the bubbly until Patrick gets his hands on some and lets us know what the power savings are like over the X550...
Actually, I was surprised that Patrick never replied on this Thread to make any comment about the card or whenever there was a review or something coming. I don't know if is common that Intel publishes its products Data Sheets months ahead NDA lifts, or if this launch was either too stealthy or just insignificant to even mention it at all.


BTW, recently I have seen a lot of people complaining about issues with some of the Intel X710 cards, but I have no idea whenever Carlsville is based on the same NIC core/IP/whatever than the other X710 series cards and shares the same issues, or if it is just the name umbrella.
 
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Yea the first two thirds of June are rough behind the scenes. @TXAG26 has the right idea by @ tagging me.

We do not have them yet, but we can see about getting them.
 

Skud

Active Member
Jan 3, 2012
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Actually, I was surprised that Patrick never replied on this Thread to make any comment about the card or whenever there was a review or something coming. I don't know if is common that Intel publishes its products Data Sheets months ahead NDA lifts, or if this launch was either too stealthy or just insignificant to even mention it at all.


BTW, recently I have seen a lot of people complaining about issues with some of the Intel X710 cards, but I have no idea whenever Carlsville is based on the same NIC core/IP/whatever than the other X710 series cards and shares the same issues, or if it is just the name umbrella.
We had major data corruption issues with the X710 NICs in our Hyper-V cluster. They were used for iSCSI traffic to an HP P2000 and a Pure storage array.

The logs would show the servers being unable to flush caches to the VHDs and eventually they would go offline. The corruption was so bad that it would make the VHD unmountable and we had to restore from backup. Drivers and various settings didn’t make a difference. After a few days it would happen again.

Swapped them for X520s and no issues. The other cluster nodes with QLogic 25GbE NICs also had no issues.

We RMA’d with Intel and they replaced them but we had no confidence left to try them again.

Riley