Supermicro Jams Two Ice Lake Xeon Sockets Into Upcoming ATX Motherboards

Supermicro X12DPL-i6
(Image credit: Anandtech)

Thanks to Anandtech, we have information on two new Supermicro motherboards designed for Intel's new Ice Lake Xeon Scalable CPUs: the 12DPL-NT6 and X12DPL-i6. The boards feature dual LGA4189 sockets -- for a max potential configuration of 80 CPU cores all squished into a standard ATX form factor.

The stand-out feature of the X12DPL-NT6 and X12DPL-i6 is the ATX form factor; Supermicro has demonstrated it can put two gigantic LGA4189 sockets onto an ATX board without sacrificing many features; the two sockets alone take up nearly half of the entire board's size.

The only feature Supermicro had cut out was the platform's maximum support of twelve DIMM slots. Due to the size constraints, each CPU can only access up to four DIMM slots (eight total on the board), meaning each chip will be limited to quad-channel memory configurations. This will only be a problem if you're workloads benefit from significantly high memory bandwidth/capacity.

For connectivity, you get four PCIe 4.0 slots on the bottom, with each slot having the full 16 lanes available. For storage, the boards support twelve SATA slots with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 array support, and dual M.2 PCIe Gen 4.0 slots.

The only difference between the X12DPL-NT6 and X12DPL-i6 is the ethernet and M.2 configuration. With the X12DPL-NT6 you get dual Intel X550 10Gb Ethernet ports, and one more M.2 slot capable of PCIe Gen 4.0 x8 support.

The lower end X12DPL-i6 does not include 10Gb Ethernet and instead relies on two Intel i210 Gigabit LAN controllers for network connectivity. It also loses the x8 M.2 slot.

We have no idea of when these boards will be available to purchase, but if you're in the market for something like this, Supermicro will probably happily return your emails or phone calls.

Aaron Klotz
Freelance News Writer

Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.