NVIDIA HGX Vera CPU Platform and Vera CPU Compute Tray
NVIDIA’s Vera CPU appeared here on two distinct boards. The NVIDIA HGX Vera CPU Platform is a single-socket Vera host board with eight SOCAMM memory modules, four per side. At the HGX platform level, NVIDIA says that HGX Rubin NVL8 can use either an x86 CPU baseboard or this single-socket Vera CPU option.
NVIDIA’s specs give Vera 88 custom Olympus Arm cores and 176 threads, up to 1.5TB of LPDDR5X at up to 1.2TB/s, 1.8TB/s NVLink-C2C, PCIe Gen6, and CXL 3.1. You will see more testing of Vera soon on STH.
The NVIDIA Vera CPU Compute Tray, billed as “The CPU for agents,” had two Vera CPUs plus their LPDDR5X memory. NVIDIA’s Vera CPU rack puts 256 of these CPUs in a 48U liquid-cooled MGX rack.
These boards always look very cool.
Next, let us look at the NVIDIA HGX B300 platform.
Aivres KR5288 5U Liquid-Cooled HGX B300 Server
The KR5288 is a 5U HGX B300 server with eight NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs on fifth-generation NVLink at 1.8TB/s per GPU, plus AMD EPYC CPUs. We have seen many HGX 8-GPU platforms over the years, so this is a well-known architecture. A fun one here is that Aivres is crediting Chenbro for the chassis. Cenbro makes the chassis for many of these, but rarely gets credit.
The front has 12x expansion slots and eight U.2 NVMe bays. Aivres lists 8x NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNICs at 800Gb/s per GPU plus four PCIe 5.0 slots. With the Blackwell Ultra generation, the ConnectX-8 SuperNICs are integrated on the HGX baseboard, so you generally see eight fewer PCIe NICs in this generation.
Aivres says it achieves over 80% liquid-cooling coverage, with direct-to-chip cold plates on the CPUs, GPUs, and NVSwitch. The idea is to remove most of the heat from the highest heat-generating components from the chassis with liquid cooling, then use air cooling for the rest of the lower-power components. That reduces the need to put cold plates on everything.
The rear has liquid ports and yellow-capped quick disconnects alongside the fans, plus separate 54V and 12V power supplies.
For easier service, the bottom tray slides out on its own set of internal rails. Next, let us look at PCIe GPUs.
Aivres KR6268 6U NVIDIA RTX PRO Server
The Aivres KR6268 is a 6U server with support for eight RTX PRO 6000 or RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, dual Intel Xeon 6 CPUs, and 32 DDR5-6400 DIMMs. The RTX PRO 6000 has 96GB of GDDR7 at up to 600W, while the RTX PRO 4500 is a single-slot 165W card with 32GB.
This one is air-cooled, with 15 hot-swap fans. There are five on the front and two rows of five inside.
With the fan wall out of the way, you can see the GPU slots. This display unit has only one NVIDIA card installed, but we have seen this server style for many years.
Around back are the expansion slots and power supply bays for 4+4 redundant power.
This is a small detail, but you can see the management port and local management in the corner, so it is not located on the motherboard. That is a tiny one, but just interesting to see.
Final Words
Aivres covered everything from a full Vera Rubin NVL72 rack to an air-cooled RTX PRO server. The KL2288, with HGX Rubin NVL8 and AMD EPYC Venice in a fanless 2U tray, and lots of Vera were the highlights for us because they show two ways NVIDIA is extending the 8 GPU HGX platform. There is always neat stuff in these booths at OCP.
