Gigabyte, one of the leaders in high-performance servers and workstations, has just launched a dual-way motherboard, the MP72-HB0, featuring support for up to 256 ARM cores and is ideal for cloud-native workloads. At the same time, the company also introduced the G242-P35 and G242-P36 servers. Available with Ampere Altra/Altra Max processors and up to 120 TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage.
These GPU-centric service area/motherboard platforms will soon find their home in the hyperscale/cloud workload space.
One of the Altra Max processors offers more predictable high performance as it comes with 128 cores / 128 threads on board.
Complemented by multi-socket support and rich PCIe / CCIX lanes, the platform is highly scalable and offers industry-leading power efficiency performance.
The following are the features of Ampere Altra Max.
"● High performance: up to 128C / 128T ● High throughput: 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes (192 available in dual configuration) ● CCIX optimized for inter-socket communication High power efficiency: 250W thermal design power (TDP) ● High bandwidth/memory capacity: supports 8 channels @ DDR4-3200 ● Suitable for a wide range of compute-intensive applications from the cloud to the edge"
MP72-HB0 Platform Overview.
"With this E-ATX motherboard, Gigabyte is able to provide users with a new way to do cloud-native processing outside of the data center to advance the adoption of cloud-based e-commerce and other services. Combined with the dual CPU slot design, the motherboard is also capable of supporting top-of-the-line processing power - two Altra Max processors from Ampere (up to 250W TDP)."
As for the G242-P35 and G242-P36, it provides exclusive support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe U.2 SSDs for this series of single-path ARM servers.
The G242 product line was previously focused on SATA / SAS drives only, but Gigabyte actively listened to feedback from a wide range of customers.
"The main difference between the two products is that the -P35 supports up to four slots of GPU expansion, while the -P36 is a developer kit designed for NVIDIA ARM HPC and supports up to two GPU expansions only. On top of the Ampere Altra platform, each slot has 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes per CPU, but four PCIe 4.0 x16 sets are used to support CCIX. This enables low latency and cache coherency for additional benefits to GPUs, GPFAs, and network/storage adapters."
CCIX is said to enable efficient heterogeneous computing through the increased transfer rates of PCIe 4.0. At the same time, next-generation server applications can also take advantage of this.
In terms of OS support, the above Gigabyte ARM servers support Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Oracle, Debian and other distributions.
In addition, as a company focused on hardware solutions, product development has always been a key factor in its growth decisions.
"Gigabyte has been providing in-house support for ARM solutions for nearly a decade, and the engineers are quite familiar with, and have carefully designed, the ecosystem. With competitive solutions, Gigabyte is able to expand its portfolio to cover more markets such as the enterprise niche. Today's new motherboard/server offerings provide Gigabyte customers with the cloud-native solutions they so desperately need."
Finally, Gigabyte offers a companion Management Console (GMC), as well as a BMC server management solution that can be carried out through a web browser.
Interested parties can download Gigabyte Server Management (GSM) software to easily monitor and manage multiple servers without incurring additional licensing fees.
This provides customers with significant maintainable value while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).
