A 16x NVIDIA GPU 128 Core Arm Server Supermicro ARS-210M-NR with Ampere Altra

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Supermicro ARS 210M NR Internal Overview Configured
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Internal Overview Configured

Some days we get to review machines that are nothing short of being fun. This is one of those. The Supermicro ARS-210M-NR is the company’s 2U MegaDC server designed for scale-out deployments. It utilizes Supermicro’s Mt. Hamilton motherboard and the Ampere Altra/ Altra Max series processors. We previously reviewed theĀ Supermicro ARS-210ME-FNR 2U Edge Ampere Altra Max Arm Server that had more of an edge computing focus. This is a 2U server in a configuration designed for dense cloud gaming with 16x GPUs via 4x NVIDIA A16 cards. With that, let us get to the system.

Supermicro ARS-210M-NR External Hardware Overview

The system’s front tells us that there is going to be something different about this system. The front of the system has both storage and GPUs present.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front

On the left side, we have a mix of NVMe as well as SATA/ SAS storage, but this is configurable. The 2.5″ drive trays are Supermicro’s toolless design. Also, we will note that Supermicro has versions of this server without the front GPUs and more storage bays instead.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front NVMe Storage
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front NVMe Storage

Since the internal overview is extensive, we are going to show a bit of the inside, such as the backplanes in our external overview. Here we can see that there are four of the bays wired for NVMe, while the rest lead to a Broadcom SAS/ SATA controller we will see later in this review.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Backplane
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Backplane

The right side of the chassis has two double-width GPU slots. There is another option to run all four of the double-width slots that we will show as single slot instead, but this server has a unique configuration.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Two GPUs
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Two GPUs

The two front GPUs are cooled by a giant fan.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Fan For GPUs
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Fan For GPUs

Here is another look at the GPUs and the fan behind them from a different angle.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Fan For GPUs 2
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Front Fan For GPUs 2

The rear of the system is also very busy with power supplies, GPU risers, and rear I/O.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear

The power supplies are 2kW 80Plus Titanium redundant units. In this server, these are needed.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR 2kW 80Plus Titanium PSU
Supermicro ARS 210M NR 2kW 80Plus Titanium PSU

The rear I/O includes two USB 3.0 ports, a VGA port, an out-of-band management port, and two SFP28 ports for 25GbE networking.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear IO
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear IO

Above the rear I/O and also to the right side are two GPU risers. Again, we have double-width NVIDIA A16 GPUs installed, but we will show how these work with single-width cards in our internal overview.

Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear Right GPU
Supermicro ARS 210M NR Rear Right GPU

Below the right GPU riser, we have a PCIe Gen4 x16 low-profile riser slot and an OCP NIC 3.0 slot that also gets x16 lanes.

Next, let us get inside the system to see how it is configured.

6 COMMENTS

  1. We ran the Bombsquad-stress in this system which up to 128 instances (concurrent users) with 1080P@60fps.
    When running the high-quality Genshin Impact this system can support 48 instances and all running 1080P@60fps.

  2. If this has 16x GPUs, then the First Gen EPYC dual-socket configuration had 8-CPUs.

    It’s how Nvidia wants to market it but it’s not how we’ve discussed these sorts of products in the past. If one of the GPUs goes bad, how many do you need to replace? 1? Nope, you need to replace 4.

    DDR5 almost had this problem but we’ve all settled on calling the current systems by the number of DIMMS instead of sub-channels.

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