ASRock Rack 1U24E1S-GENOA/2L2T Power Consumption
Taking a look at the power supply, one will notice that this is very different from the 12x 2.5″ power supply. Power increases from 1kW to 1.6kW to help service more power consumption from additional E1.S devices. The 80Plus Titanium efficiency rating is one of the better out there right now. In order to make a high-power efficient power supply, it is elongated and slimmer than many power supplies we see.
At idle, this was another AMD EPYC Genoa/ Bergamo system running in the 115-140W range. Our maximum power consumption was in the 460-510W range at the top end, focusing on CPU and memory testing. That leaves a lot of power budget for the E1.S devices as well as high-speed networking.
STH Server Spider: ASRock Rack 1U24E1S-GENOA/2L2T
In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.
This is a very storage-centric machine. However, since it is a 12-channel AMD EPYC platform with a 2DPC design, we get a lot of memory capacity as well. As a 1U system with PCIe being dedicated to storage, there is not a lot of room for adding more than one lower-power GPU or AI accelerator in a server like this. One area that might change this, is that we recently saw the Biscotti Dual Hailo-8 AI E1.S Module. If more AI accelerators start adopting E1.S, then this could end up becoming a really interesting AI inferencing platform. While AI is a hot topic these days, a big part of AI infrastructure is storage, which is what this system focuses on.
Final Words
Having a 24-bay E1.S solution is awesome, especially with a single-socket CPU behind it. E1.S does not have the highest capacity, but one can get a lot of performance from a number of drives with the heatsinks used in E1.S 15mm drives. If we start seeing more E1.S AI accelerators, then it could get even more exciting. Using a single socket to service a system like this has benefits like not requiring socket-to-socket data transfers and lowering the server’s power consumption quite a bit.
The concept of forcing air through the large heatsink extension using the cable channel guides was different and seems to have worked well here. It almost feels like this was designed for a much higher TDP CPU than the 128-core AMD EPYC Bergamo we used here.
If you are looking for a single-socket AMD EPYC 9004 server with lots of memory capacity and 24x E1.S EDSFF slots for SSDs or other modules, then the ASRock Rack 1U24E1S-GENOA/2L2T makes for a really interesting option.
