Gigabyte Announces Support for New Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2 and E5-1600 V2 Platforms

Along with other manufacturers such as Supermicro and Tyan, Gigabyte announced support for new Intel Xeon E5-1600 V2 and E5-2600 V2 product families. To support Ivy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-EP, Gigabyte is upgrading BIOS on many existing platforms to support the new processors. Also, Gigabyte claims to have technology (we have not verified this yet) to maintain 1866MHz memory operation even with fully populated DIMM slots. More to come in the next few weeks. The great news here is that there is another generation with significant power savings and performance enhancements (due to additional cores) that will drop into existing infrastructure. Unlike the 3-15% improvement we saw on the Haswell desktop side this year, the server-side has the capability to see 30-50% improvement with this generation by simply replacing chips. Below is a copy of the press release.

Taipei, Taiwan, September 11^th 2013 – GIGABYTE Technology, an innovation leader in the development of high technology and advanced features in server computing, is happy to announce today, in coordination with Intel’s official launch, the full support of the new Intel Xeon processors E5-1600 V2 & 2600 V2 product families. Across GIGABYTE’s entire line of server and workstation motherboards, racks and high performance computing modules designed on the socket 2011, the high value features of this new generation of processors are now available to server and network infrastructure builders looking for hardware excellence.

Intel Xeon Processors E5-1600 V2 & E5-2600 V2 Product Families

Deployable through a simple BIOS update, the support of Intel Xeon processors E5-1600 V2 & 2600 V2 product families delivers the benefits of the 22nm tri-gate process technology to the high end server industry. Those benefits include, among others, higher frequencies, higher core counts (up to 12 cores / 24 threads) and larger last-level caches, but especially a much more varied mix of core/frequencies with notably the introduction of a new dual socket workstation segment. This new die shrink also allows for overall energy efficiency increase, with up to 30% average decrease in idle power consumption.

Moreover, this new generation sees the enablement of 1866 MHz memory frequency when the previous generation was limited to 1600MHz, which will bring a new performance edge to industries relying heavily on in-memory storage.

Finally, virtualization applications will benefit from increased performance thanks to the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) technology, and more security features are included in the mix as well, such as the Intel Platform Protection Technology with OS Guard, and Intel Data Protection Technology with Secure Key.

Faster Memory, with GIGABYTE Only

Always eager to go beyond the industry standards, GIGABYTE’s engineering has enabled through its capabilities in design, PCB layout and BIOS fine-tuning the support of 1866 MHz memory frequency running at higher DIMM population (8 DIMMs per socket) where Intel’s standard and the rest of the market’s products will typically operate memory speed downgrade and support 1866 MHz at lower DIMM population only (4 DIMMs per socket). GIGABYTE therefore offers at launch on its 2011 socket based products this unique feature which will benefit to high density and memory intensive applications, such as high frequency trading, telecommunication networks, mobile data transfers, and so on.

Compatible Lineup

GIGABYTE products supporting the new Intel Xeon processors E5-1600 V2 & E5-2600 V2 product families:

Gigabyte Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2 and E5-1600 V2 platforms