TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 5, 2018 — GIGABYTE, an industry leader in high-performance server hardware, and Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, have announced the availability of GIGABYTE’s ThunderX2-based H-Series Density Optimized Server platforms in the third quarter of this year (Q3 2018).

With the addition of this new server platform GIGABYTE continues to broaden its offering of commercially available Arm-based server solutions and demonstrate engineering expertise in delivering density optimized high performance platforms.  Through its world-wide presence, GIGABYTE is uniquely positioned to accelerate the adoption and deployment of ThunderX2-based systems into the cloud and high-performance computing applications.

GIGABTYE’s H261 series is a 2U platform with up to 4 dual-socket ThunderX2 compute nodes that can scale up to 1024 logical processors with 4 thread SMT and can address up to 4TB of memory capacity. The chassis has multiple PCIe expansion slots and can support 12 x 3.5″ drives (H261-T60) or 24 2.5″ drives (H261-T61) making it an ideal solution for applications that are compute and memory intensive.

Platform Specifications:

• Form Factor: 2U 4Node
• CPU: Dual socket ThunderX2 Arm®v8 Processors
• Memory: Up to 16 DDR4 slots per node
• PCIe: 2 Low Profile x16 PCIe 3.0 Slots and 1 x OCP x16 Mezzanine Card
• Network: 2 x 10/25 GbE SFP+ LOM, 1x 10/100/1000 Management
• BMC: ASPEED AST2500 with IPMI management SW
• Storage: 12 x 3.5″ hot-swappable HDD bays, (3 per node) (H261-T60)
  24 x 2.5″ hot-swappable HDD/SSD bays (6 per node) (H261-T61)
• PSU: 2200W Platinum PSU (1+1)
• OS Support: Supports a variety of OS environments including Canonical, CentOS and SuSE

The ThunderX2 family includes over 40 different SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications, ranging from top bin 32 core 2.5GHz parts to 16-core 1.6GHz parts, mapping directly across Intel’s Xeon Skylake server CPUs from highest end Platinum to low end SKUs. The ThunderX2 family offers 2-4X better performance per dollar compared to Xeon Skylake family of processors.  The ThunderX2 family is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards. The ThunderX2 SoC family is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem, ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial Operating Systems, Development Environments and Applications. Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to a broad array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its leadership role in the Open Source software community driving upstream kernel enablement and toolchain optimization, actively contributing to Linaro’s Enterprise and Networking Groups, investing in key Linux Foundation projects such as DPDK, OpenHPC, OPNFV and Xen and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s Armv8 server implementation.

“GIGABYTE offers industry’s broadest portfolio of ThunderX2 platforms with variety of form factors optimized for different server workloads” said Andy Chen, Vice President of Research and Development, GIGABYTE Technology. “The H261 Series further expands our ThunderX2 platform portfolio and provides our customers production-ready density optimized Arm server solutions ideal for high performance computing applications. Our entire portfolio of ThunderX2 systems is now available for order and we look forward to introducing more platforms with Cavium server SoCs.”

“ThunderX2, our second-generation 64-bit Armv8 processor family, is the industry’s most widely adopted Arm server processor. It integrates many custom Armv8-A cores, best-in-class memory bandwidth, memory capacity and rich I/O into a single server SoC,” said Surya Hotha, Director of Product Marketing, Data Center Processor Group at Cavium. “The new series of GIGABYTE’s 2U4N Density Optimized H261 platforms are ideal for next generation HPC and cloud computing workloads that demand outstanding performance and significant TCO benefits.”

In addition to the 2U4N high-density H261 platforms, GIGABYTE will launch their ThunderX2-based 1U and 2U R-Series General Purpose Rack Server platforms in July 2018.

GIGABYTE’s H261 series will be showcased at the COMPUTEX 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan from June 5^th – 9^th, at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Cavium’s suite 2412.

Availability

GIGABYTE’s H261-T60 and H261-T61 ThunderX2 servers will be available to order from Q3 of 2018. Please visit http://www.gigabyte.com/Buy  to contact your local GIGABYTE Arm Server distributor for further pricing and availability information.

About GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE was founded in 1986 and has established an enviable reputation for continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted IT hardware leader globally. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we offer a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Embedded Products. GIGABYTE is dedicated to enabling your digital life, responding promptly and effectively to market needs and desires.

About Cavium

Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware-reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan.

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Source: GIGABYTE