Request for Recommendations: media / transcode server

[Ravi Pokala]

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org>
Date: 2019-11-14, Thursday at 03:35
To: Ravi Pokala <rpokala at freebsd.org>
Cc: "freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org" <freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Request for Recommendations: media / transcode server
    
    > 
    > On Nov 14, 2019, at 12:40 AM, Ravi Pokala <rpokala at freebsd.org> wrote:
    > ...
    > _
    
    The bad news.
    
    No one is making server class boards off the current gen SoC based x86 stuff like they did with the atom c2000 based stuff.

I ended up with my current board because we were evaluating C2000 at work, and we used this board to do it. It worked well at the office, so I picked one up for myself.

(As luck would have it, we started using C2000 late enough that the errata had already been discovered and fixed by the time we started shipping, so our products don't have this problem.)

I had planned to move forward to one of the follow-on SoCs, but I wasn't able to find any the last I checked.

But! I just checked ark.intel.com for Denverton (the codename of the follow-on SoC), and found quite a few of them; it looks like they're branded as "C3000".

And I was able to find quite a few "C3000"s at Supermicro:

https://www.supermicro.com/en/search?Search=C3000

I'll look more closely tonight, but those seem to be in the right ballpark at least.

    If you look for J4000/J5000 based boards all there is are media server boards with no BMC, 1 SODIMM slot, two SATA ports, and a single PCI-e slot. 

"Media server" and "two SATA ports"... <facepalm>


    You’ll need to step up to something like a SM X11SPA which is a lot of board to get what you want.

Yeah, I don't need a full-blown Xeon for this. Heck, I don't even want something with a *socket* for this! :-)
    
    Supposedly the ARM ecosystem was going to fill that void (or pushed x86 out depending on who you ask) but I don’t really know if that happened. 

Indeed. Alas, neither the arm64 hardware nor our arm64 support seems to be quite there yet. :-(

Thanks!

Ravi (rpokala@)

    Thanks,
    
    Josh Paetzel