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Intel C600 Chipset Family

Intel Xeon E5-2600: Doing Damage With Two Eight-Core CPUs
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Thus far, our only experience with Intel’s platform controller hub code-named Patsburg is X79 Express. However, the same piece of silicon is also used as a foundation for the C600 chipset family.

We’ve long known that X79 didn’t expose all of the core logic’s integrated functionality. It comes close, but there’s an entire Storage Controller Unit that goes unused. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We recently saw ECS’ X79R-AX enable four SAS ports in Seven $260-$320 X79 Express Motherboards, Reviewed.

The PCH that ECS employs corresponds to the –B variant of C600. Otherwise identical to X79 (including the same 14 USB 2.0 ports, an integrated gigabit Ethernet MAC, eight lanes of second-gen PCIe, and HD Audio), the –B model officially adds four 6 Gb/s SAS ports to the four 3 Gb and two 6 Gb/s SATA connectors. Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver facilitates RAID 0, 1, 10, and, with the addition of a BIOS update, RAID 5 support with hardware-based XOR across the SATA ports. SAS is limited to RAID 0, 1, and 10, though you can add an upgrade ROM to get RAID 5 as well.

Intel C600 Chipset

-A
-B
-D
-T
PCH-Based SATA 3Gb/s Ports
4
4
4
4
PCH-Based SATA 6Gb/s Ports
2
2
2
2
SCU-Based Ports
4 x SATA
4 x SAS
8 x SAS
8 x SAS
RSTe SATA RAID Support
RAID 0/1/10/5
RAID 0/1/10/5RAID 0/1/10/5RAID 0/1/10/5
RSTe SAS RAID Support
No
RAID 0/1/10
RAID 0/1/10RAID 0/1/10
RST3 SAS RAID 5 Support
No
No
No
 Yes
Silicon-Based RAID 5 XOR
Yes
YesYesYes
PCI Express 3.0 x4 Uplink
No
No
Yes
yes


Stepping up to the –D SKU doubles SAS connectivity to eight ports. Add that to the PCH’s native SATA and you end up with 10 total 6 Gb/s ports and four 3 Gb/s ports. Now, consider that C600 connects to one Xeon E5 processor via DMI 2.0—a four-lane PCIe 2.0-like link with 20 Gb/s of bidirectional throughput. That's a bottleneck just waiting to happen. So, Intel connects the PCH's SCU directly to four PCIe lanes hijacked from one of the processors, alleviating traffic from the storage controller.

The flagship –T version is functionally identical (including the eight SAS ports and four-lane uplink), only it includes RAID 5 support for the SATA and SAS ports, too. It’s not clear how much of a premium stepping up through the C600 hierarchy adds to Xeon E5-ready motherboards. However, if you were planning on buying an add-in HBA or RAID controller anyway, the option to get much of that functionality on-board is certainly convenient.

If you don’t need any of that fancy stuff, there’s a baseline –A model with four SATA 3Gb/s ports and six SATA 6Gb/s ports, four of which are tied to the SCU. It still supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5, and it includes hardware-based XOR, too. There’s just no SAS connectivity.

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  • 0 Hide
    may1 , 7 March 2012 07:48
    Why is it that they never test out games on these CPUs... oh wait.
  • 1 Hide
    devBunny , 7 March 2012 08:05
    When I saw the VS 2010:Google Chrome compilation showing on the graph as 10 seconds to compile I was getting ready to be really impressed ... until the text said 10 minutes. ;o)
  • 1 Hide
    david801644 , 7 March 2012 15:48
    Yea, but how about the Quake frame rate?
  • 1 Hide
    Dr_M0rph3us , 7 March 2012 19:11
    Great review - it covered almost everything related to real workstation workload. These CPUs offer a big performance increase over the previous XEON line, but I'd also wait to see the retail prices before starting building new architecture solutions using this platform.