ASUS showed off a number of new AI servers at NVIDIA GTC 2024. There were a number of traditional AI servers, but some were also based on NVIDIA Grace. It took us a bit longer to get this one up as the Blue LED strips in the black booth made photography very challenging. Still, there were some cool systems there so we wanted to cover them as well.
ASUS NVIDIA Servers at GTC 2024
The first system we saw was the ASUS ESC NM1-E1 that had been autographed.
This is a 2U NVIDIA Grace Hopper system that has room for PCIe and SSD expansion.
For more Arm cores, we saw the ASUS RS720QN-E11-RS24U.
This is a 2U 4-node Grace Superchip server. Each node has 144 CPU cores using around 500W each.
We found the baseboard as the ASUS NCPH-UD with expansion slots and the baseboard management controller.
On the more traditional side, we saw the ASUS ESC N8A-E12. We have seen this 7U system before.
It is the NVIDIA HGX platform from ASUS, so it will house eight NVIDIA H200 GPUs as that refresh gets underway this quarter.
We also saw the ASUS ESC4000A-E12. This is using 4x PCIe GPUs. PCIe is a really easy-to-integrate form factor, and so we are going to see x16 double-slot AI accelerators cross 600W in that form factor this year. The system is based on AMD EPYC 9004 CPUs with up to 4x PCIe GPUs. We reviewed both the ASUS ESC4000A-E11 and ESC4000A-E10 generations previously.
ASUS also showed both air cooling and liquid cooling options.
The company is partnering with Delta for things like liquid cooling CDUs. We have done a ton of liquid cooling content at STH and that will continue to be a hot topic in 2024 and beyond as accelerators heat up.
Final Words
Overall, there was a lot to see here. We have been reviewing ASUS systems for years, and it is apparent that ASUS has passed companies like HPE that have been slow to adopt new AI server form factors. We did HPE and ASUS booth tours back to back, and it was clear that ASUS brought more AI server form factors.
We also have a short 1-minute video for this tour that you can find on the STH Labs channel here that provides a few more views:
