At SC22, we saw a number of really interesting systems. This week, we are showing them to you and this edition is focused on a few of the items we saw in the Gigabyte SC22 booth. We are not going to be able to cover everything, but we wanted to show off a few unique ones.
Gigabyte’s Ampere Arm and NVIDIA Servers
One of the most interesting servers we saw was the Gigabyte G492-PD0. This is a server based around a NVIDIA HGX 8x GPU subsystem. The big difference is that it uses a single Ampere Altra/ Altra Max processor instead of two x86 processors.
You may have noticed in the screen above the system a STH shirt. That is because the system next to it was a 2U server and so my NVIDIA GTC video was playing.
The video shown at the booth was a different video from what we had on STH, but if you want to learn more about the Ampere Arm server plus NVIDIA GPU offering, you can see: The Most Important Server of 2022 The Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA A100.
We had a video for that one as well.
Gigabyte AMD EPYC 9004 “Genoa” Systems at SC22
Gigabyte had a ton of AMD EPYC “Genoa” systems at SC22. Perhpas the most interesting was the Gigabyte G493-ZB0.
In what may be one of my favorite photos from thousands of the show, one can see that along with some standard I/O, the front of the system is essentially just a large pass-through vent to improve airflow. If you think there is something exciting on the other side of that vent, you are right.
Inside there is a dual-socket AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa motherboard. This is notable because it is a 24 DIMM per CPU or 2DPC dual-socket design. As such, there are 48 DDR5 DIMM slots in the server. That is an absolutely massive number rivaling the sheer number of DIMM slots found in current generation 4-socket 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Cooper Lake systems.
In our AMD EPYC Genoa Gaps Intel Xeon in Stunning Fashion launch coverage and our How to Populate AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa Memory Channels guide, we noted that 2DPC dual-socket configurations will be supported in 2023, but Gigabyte has the solution today.
Behind this motherboard is a massive fan wall.
The rear of the system has 8x double-width PCIe slots, but then another two that are above for a total of 10 cards that can be installed. This system has massive CPU, memory, and GPU/ accelerator possibilities making it extremely exciting.
Perhaps the most interesting use case here will be to see if this is a CXL enabled server. We could imagine companies using something like this for 48x DDR5 RDIMMs plus CXL memory expanders to get massive DRAM capacities.
Aside from that system, one really interesting one we saw was a 2U 4-node Genoa system.
The Gigabyte H273-Z81 packs 8x AMD EPYC Genoa processors into a 2U space. This is clearly a generation beyond the Milan version we showed in How Liquid Cooling Servers Works with Gigabyte and CoolIT.
It is certainly a challenge to cool eight high-power CPUs and 96 DIMMs (~5W each) in a 2U chassis. That is part of the reason we started showing liquid cooling severla quarters ago.
Final Words
Gigabyte had many more systems and even immersion cooling in its booth. I just wanted to show a few of the more unique solutions off. It was also funny to see my video looping in the booth around the Arm servers. Hopefully we will start to review the new systems starting in early 2023.
Update: We just published our video that has more views and some video on this one here:
Any single socket 9004 motherboards for a “home” system? ATX even?
Mama, Asrock gonna release GENOAD8UD-2T/X550 in mATX this year.
Good god, that 2U quad-node machine is a monster! Can you even imagine EIGHT Epyc Genoas in ONE box?! God, the potential core counts alone are unfathomable! I realize that’s split across four dual-socket nodes, but damn son! At this point, is it fair to start calling these things mainframes? Because the MASSIVE I/O and compute capacity of these things oughtta plant them squarely into that class regardless of architecture. Plus, I keep waiting to see one of these companies produce an actual x86-64 based mainframe, that’s literally the last class type that hasn’t been developed with x86 processors. I’ve seen ’em in POWER, IBM’s z/Architecture and even some Arm variants, but not yet in x86.
Let it run a Chess bench ,it will use All these threads with pleasure..
I see that you just can click on ”Ipmanchess” above and it opens my Chess Bench list!
RE: GENOAD8UD-2T
It took Asrock 8 months from “preliminary” status to actually launch their WRX80 board, hopefully it’s not going to be the same with the Genoa board since it’s more mainstream.