Diamond Cooling in the MiTAC G8825Z5 Server
Besides their rack-scale offerings, MiTAC also offers a large array of individual servers. And a few of these were getting showcased at the show. First up was the MiTAC G8825Z5, a very beefy 8U dual-processor AMD system that houses 8 MI350X accelerators. Unlike MiTAC’s rackscale-optimized servers, which incorporate liquid cooling to maximize hardware density, the G8825Z5 is a tamer air-cooled system that is not making the same push for density. This does not mean the server lacks a trick up its sleeve in the form of Akash Systems’ “Diamond Cooling” technology.
The flashy name is not unearned. Akash is using synthetic diamond as a thermal transfer medium, counting on the higher thermal conductivity of diamond (or rather, structured carbon) to outperform copper. The central idea being that with a more conductive material, a smaller temperature difference is required to extract the same amount of heat energy from a processor, allowing data center operators to run warmer environments. This in turn would allow data centers to run with less cooling, making them more energy efficient overall.
At the show, MiTAC was claiming that data centers would be able to operate the G8825Z5 with a rather toasty 95F inlet temperature without throttling, which is quite a bit warmer than what traditionally chilly data centers operate at. Unfortunately, MiTAC did not have the G8825Z5 open at Computex to actually show off the diamond cooling technology, so curious attendees had to take MiTAC’s word on the matter.
Besides the AMD hardware at the heart of the system and the exotic cooling system keeping those chips cool, the G8825Z5 also comes with quite a bit of expandability, thanks to its size. For storage, the system offers 8 U.2 drive bays.
While for further PCIe expansion, there are 8 HHHL PCIe Gen5 slots, and a further 4 FHHL PCI Gen5 slots, giving server vendors plenty of options for plugging in NICs, DPUs, and all sorts of other customizations. And while the system is designed for air cooling, that does not mean it goes easy on power consumption: it comes with a 13.2kW power supply.
TN85-B8261 For Traditional PCIe
Meanwhile for customers who need a more conventional server without exotic cooling technologies or trays of OAM form factor GPUs (and the vendor lock-in that entails), MiTAC also continues to make numerous highly customizable PCIe servers. One such example at the show was the TN85-B8261, another dual socket AMD server intended to be used with AMD or NVIDIA PCIe accelerator cards.
The 2U server can be filled with either EPYC 9004 (Zen 4) or 9005 (Zen 5) processors, and with enough slots for one DIMM per channel supports up to 6TB of RAM across both CPUs. Meanwhile the matrix for PCIe cards gets a bit more complex, but fundamentally the system has 4 FHFL double-wide PCIe Gen5 slots. This allows it to fit up to 4 of AMD and NVIDIA’s latest mid-power PCIe cards. Though customers who want to use their high-performance (i.e. high power demand) cards such as the MI350P or RTX PRO Blackwell RTX 6000 will have to drop it down to 2 cards per server.
Meanwhile the version on display at Computex was the 8 SSD bay version, which features 8 U.2 drive bays. For customers with greater storage needs, there is also a variant of this system with a whopping 24 drive bays – essentially filling the entire front of the system with storage.
The system comes with dual 2.7kW power supplies, underscoring its more modest aims. MiTAC considers it a broad use case workhorse, not the least of which is a server for AI inference workloads.
Next up, let’s take a look at storage and some of the other odds and ends MiTAC had on display.
