X11SRA

Another product on display over at Supermicro at this year’s CES was that of a Xeon W motherboard. Xeon W is Intel’s professional platform that is almost a copy/paste of the high-end desktop X299 platform, but uses a professional grade chipset and offers support for ECC and RDIMM memory. Like Skylake-X, the Xeon W platform supports up to 18-core CPUs (Xeon W-2195), with almost the same specifications, except for support up to 512GB of DRAM. In previous years, these two families of products were served by a single platform, but recently Intel has seen fit to separate them. As a result, we are seeing fewer and fewer professional-grade motherboards hitting the open market, leaving most sales in the hands of pre-built OEMs. With Supermicro...