At SC22, Inspur showed off new AMD EPYC Genoa platforms, as well as a big liquid-cooled OAM server. The company also took the opportunity to show off its new naming convention for next-generation servers.
Inspur Shows AMD EPYC Genoa and Major OAM Liquid Cooled Server at SC22
These servers were featured in our recent SC22 recap video that you can find here:
The first server we saw was the Inspur NF5180G7. This is a 1U dual socket AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa server platform. The front of the unit we saw at SC22 was a 10x 2.5″ configuration.
Here we can see the huge area between the fans and the CPU sockets. That is a trend we are seeing to accommodate larger heatsinks.
Behind that, we can see dual OCP NIC 3.0 slots as well as a DC-SCM slot with the management processor. There are also a lot of cables to provide PCIe Gen5 lanes throughout the chassis. This example had not just the dual OCP NIC 3.0 slots, but also three riser slots.
We also noticed that there was extra room behind the drives for cable management and adding things to augment storage capabilities.
The 2U server variant is the Inspur NF5280G7. This is another dual-socket AMD EPYC Genoa server.
Perhaps the most notable difference here is the CPU heatsinks. Most vendors we have seen utilize the “winged” heatsink approach to cool the CPUs up to 400W TDP. Inspur is keeping the air-cooled heatsink over the CPU sockets.
Here is another angle, including the expansion slots. This uses the same motherboard as the 1u, but it has additional expansion and riser options just due to the height of the chassis.
The new naming convention is “G7” for Generation 7. This will get a bit more confusing with the Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon launch since there will be at least two Inspur NF5280G7’s, one AMD, and one Intel. There will be additional details on the full SKU on which processor is used. Through the 6th generation, Inspur used M6 generation for Intel, A6 generation for AMD EPYC systems, and R6 for Ampere.
Inspur’s Liquid Cooled OAM Machine
Inspur has been building OAM and the Universal Baseboard (UBB) standard platforms for some time. At SC22, we were able to see a liquid-cooled version with large quick disconnect fittings.
The front fittings are not the only ones. We can see that there are four more nozzles at the rear.
If this platform looks familiar, we reviewed the Inspur NF5488A5 the 8x NVIDIA A100 version of this some time ago.
Here is the rear of that system with fans instead of liquid cooling.
Fans and heatsinks made up a large amount of that system’s volume and weight, making it an ideal candidate for liquid cooling as accelerator TDPs continue to rise.
Final Words
Overall, it was great to see the new Inspur solutions at SC22. We hope to see the company’s new Genoa and Sapphire Rapids systems soon, but there are a few other interesting Inspur reviews that we will have this month that are not from those product lines.
OAM = “OCP Acceleration Module”?
OCP = Open Compute Project?
I can’t remember hearing about OAMs, and don’t know the OCP just by its initials.
Cabled PCIe is such a good idea. Slots are becoming too expensive in the PCIe5 era. This should be the next big change in servers and desktop: replace x4/x8x16 slots with x4 cables, ganged up for wider kinks.
Look at nV’s 4000 series GPUs… you’re not mounting them on mobos now, you’re mounting the mobo on the GPU! Cabled PCIe will make case design and AIC cooling much easier and more flexible. Slots have outlived their usefulness.
*wider links.