Solidigm Storage on Parade
Besides their own wares, MiTAC was also showcasing some of their partners’ wares in their booth for the trade show. On the CPU side of matters, everything we saw happened to be AMD-powered in some fashion, be it systems using current-generation processors or slated to use the forthcoming EPYC Venice.
But MiTAC also had some storage options on display as well, outlining customers’ options for either high performance storage or high-capacity storage – or perhaps a mix of both.
On the high-performance front, the company had some of Solidigm’s D7-PS1010 SSDs on display. These are Solidigm’s fastest read-optimized PCIe Gen5 drives, which are rated to run at up to 14.5GB/sec sequential reads and 9.3GB/sec sequential writes. We reviewed these drives back in September; they are wicked fast.
Solidigm offers the drives in all three major form factors: U.2, E3.S, and even E.1S. The trade-off being that the fast drives are not very big in either capacity or size, maxing out at just 15.36TB each.
But for customers who need a larger drive rather than a faster drive, MiTAC also has Solidigm’s D5-P5336 SSDs as an option as well.
What these drives lack in performance (capping out at PCIe Gen4 speeds) they more than make up in capacity, with the largest capacity drives topping out at 122TB each. Backing these drives is parent company SK hynix’s 192L QLC NAND, which these drives are stuffed with in order to reach their high capacities. This makes the drives even more read-focused than the high-performance D7 drives, as we saw first-hand when we reviewed the D5-P5336 last summer.
With MiTAC offering whole server-scale and rack-scale storage solutions, the company can cram an immense amount of storage into a single rack. The company’s TS70A-B8056 2U storage servers offer 26 U.2 bays, allowing a single server to house 3.17PB of storage – and multiple servers can be installed in a single rack.
CX1-395: A Ryzen AI Max mini-PC
Finally, away from the racks of servers and giant 8U boxes, MiTAC also had a little bit of hardware on display on the other end of the spectrum. The company has been developing their own AMD-powered desktop workstations, the Agent Builder AI Station lineup, which stretches from multi-GPU desktops to small form factor PCs. The latter was on display at the show, where the company had the CX1-395 on display.
Powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, this is MiTAC’s entry into the burgeoning ecosystem of Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) powered SFF boxes for developer use. The company has seemingly opted to focus on performance, giving the mini-PC a rather breezy cooling system to help keep AMD’s big APU well-cooled.
Besides AMD’s chip, the specifications for the box are pretty typical for a Ryzen AI Max system, pairing the APU with 128GB of LPDDR5X memory, a couple of M.2 slots for SSD, and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Surprisingly, the company did not spring for a high-end wired networking solution here, so while the system does come with an RJ45 Ethernet port, it only runs at 2.5Gb.
MiOBMC and MiOPF Open-Source Firmware Stack
Finally, alongside all of MiTAC’s hardware, the company also had a bit of software to show off at Computex. MiTAC has been developing/implementing an open-source firmware stack based on OpenBMC and EDK2 as an alternative to the traditional proprietary options, which they are positioning as a competitive advantage as well as a functional advantage for customers.
MiOBMC is the company’s open-source BMC software, which is used in conjunction with their MiOPF EDK2-based system firmware. The company had demos of the complete ecosystem in action at Computex, showing off the advantages in tasks such as boot times, as well as showcasing the monitoring and management capabilities that come with MiOBMC.
