QCT QuantaEdge EGX77GE-2U NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Edge Server at GTC 2024

At GTC 2024, we saw a cool NVIDIA Grace-Hopper platform at the QCT booth. The QCT QuantaEdge EGX77GE-2U is a short-depth 2U server with the massive NVIDIA GH200 onboard. Since we had photos, we thought we would share them.

QCT QuantaEdge EGX77GE-2U NVIDIA GH200

Here is the overview of the short-depth QCT QuantaEdge EGX77GE-2U. We can see that this is set up as a 400mm deep design with all of the cables and I/O on the front of the chassis.

The left side of the chassis is dedicated to the NVIDIA GH200 (Grace Hopper.) Here we mostly have just vents. In the middle of the chassis, we can see two E1.S NVMe SSD bays.

On the right side of the chassis, we can see barebones front I/O. There are three expansion slots, all of which are PCIe Gen5 x16. The right side is for the redundant power supplies.

The PCIe slots have rear support to keep the cards secure. One can also see the fans at the rear of the chassis to keep everything cool.

Four of those fan modules are destined to keep the NVIDIA GH200 chip cool, but there was something in front that was interesting. Here we can see the motherboard or carrier board for the GH200. Then there are a bunch of MCIO connections to the PCIe slots.

Here is the massive heatsink for the GH200. These parts can use 1kW, but that is for the 72 core Arm CPU, the H200 GPU, and the LPDDR5 memory (about half a TB) that are on the module.

This is certainly a higher power edge platform, but it was great to see.

Final Words

Apparently, some customers are interested in the GH200 for edge use cases. Adding FPGA cards or others to the PCIe expansion slots yields a lot of capability for edge platforms that need more than something like a H100 PCIe card. In many ways, this feels like it is not going to be the primary deployment of the H200. We have heard the H200 is largely for proof-of-concept systems now that the GB200 has been announced. Still, it is at least a unique and interesting system to see.