The first is a based around the AppliedMicro X-Gene under the ARMv8-A architecture. Dubbed with the catchy title, the MP30-AR0 it uses the 45W X-Gene1 which is a 40nm eight-core running at 2.4 GHz and pairs of cores shared L2 cache and an overriding 8MB L3 cache.

It has quad channel ECC DDR3 using two DIMMs per channel for a total of 128GB. Two 10GbE SFP+ ports are supplied, along with two RJ-45 1 GbE ports from a Marvell 88E1512 controller.

There are four SATA 6 Gbps ports as part of the SoC, along with two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots in an x16 form factor.

It does not have USB 3.0, just USB 2.0 and a VGA output for the AST2400 server control.

The MP30-AR0 works with RM Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) and Server Base Root Requirements (SBBR) standards, and is designed for cloud and scale-out computing.

Gigabyte's ARM based platforms will most likely be a distributor B2B offering. This motherboard/SoC system will also be available in a 1U server rackmount (the R120-P30) with four hotswappable bays and a single PCIe riser card.

Storage

For storage side, Gigabyte's Server is releasing the D120-S3G, which is a rackmount powered by the Annapurna Labs Alpine AL5140. It is a 1.7 GHz Quad A15 solution running at a 10W TDP relying on ARMv7 for the instruction set.

This beastie is more for cold-storage, offering support for 16 SATA 6Gbps drives with RAID 5 and RAID 6 both supported. The motherboard has only one memory slot, but two gigabit Ethernet ports are flanked with two 10GbE integrated SFP+ ports.

An AST2400 supplies the network control, and GIGABYTE is stating support for LTS Linux Kernel 3.10 and Ubuntu 14.04. If the product page is anything to go by, this is still technically a work in progress as they have not officially announced any other connectivity.

No word on release dates or pricing, although demonstrations at events can mean they might go on sale within the next couple of months.