Gigabyte Tease LGA-3647 Skylake-E Socket Server at Computex 2016

We always find a few surprises at events like Computex with products that we might have hoped to see, but didn’t really expect. We spotted one of such surprises in the Gigabyte booth with a pretty much empty sign on top. The only information revealed here are that it is called the G291-H88 mainstream rack server and it’s the “next generation 2U Purley barebond”. Barebond is naturally a typo and should be barebone.

Those who paid attention already noticed the Purley here and not Purely. Purley is Intel’s future enterprise computing business, that is said to become a unification of its 2-socket (2S), 4-socket (4S), and >8-socket (8S+) platforms into one, codenamed Purley.

The Skylake-E platform should launch next year and this is our first real look at the new socket called the LGA 3647 which is a socket that comes with an unprecedented amount of pins.

The CPU slot cover already gives the size away and we notice right away that it’s quite a bit bigger than the average LGA 1151 one or even the LGA 2011 socket.

Will you look at all these pins, to be exact, it comes with 1636 more pins than the predecessor. We can expect some serious performance from these chips and I for one can’t wait to get my hands on a few of them and the accompanying motherboards and servers.

These new Intel CPUs will come with up to 28 cores and 56 threads, 70MB L3 cache, 48 PCI-E lanes, and six-channel DDR4 memory support. Talk about performance, especially considering that you can run more than one of these in a single motherboard with the right design. I’m excited!

More Computex 2016 coverage will follow shortly, so stay tuned for more.