Taipei (Taiwan) - Motherboard maker Iwill today announced a high-end board that can carry two AMD Opteron processors and up to 64 GByte of DDR memory or 8 DIMMs for each CPU.

The new DK88 is the first mass-produced board that can carry up to 16 memory modules for a maximum capacity of 64 GByte, once 4 GByte devices become available on a broad basis. Iwill said that it used a chose digital voltage regulator module instead of the traditional aluminum electrolytic capacitors, which resulted in significant space savings on the board and provided sufficient room for more memory modules.

According to the manufacturer, the board supports registered memory with ECC and chip-kill function and targets memory intensive applications, for example in the EDA and CAD areas.

Memory manufacturers do not produce 4 GByte modules in large quantities at this time, which leaves the current maximum capacity of the DK88 at 32 GByte (2 GByte x 16). Iwill's supermodel comes with two sockets for dual-Opteron 200 processors, which currently includes the options of models 265 (1.8 GHz), 270 (2.0 GHz) and 275 (2.2 GHz) for dual-core chips and the versions 240, 242, 244, 246, 248, 250 and 252 (1.4 to 2.6 GHz) for single-core configurations.

Additional features include PCI Express x16 and x8 as well as a PCI-X 133 slot, dual Gbit Ethernet controllers and support for SATA II with RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. Pricing and availability details have not been announced.