Power Consumption
The redundant power supplies in the server are 1.6kW units. These are 80Plus Platinum rated units. At this point, most power supplies we see that are over 1kW are 80Plus Platinum rated. Almost none are 80Plus Gold at this point and a few are now Titanium rated.
The system is designed for heavy GPU acceleration. Our test configuration with the EPYC 7532 CPUs idled around 0.2kW and we saw around 0.6kW of power consumption from the box at the higher-end. With 1.6kW power supplies, this leaves around 1kW of headroom for GPUs, SmartNICs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.
STH Server Spider: Tyan Transport HX TS75-B8252
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.
As a 2U platform, this is not necessarily going to be as dense as form factors such as 2U4N. At the same time, with a large number of PCIe Gen4 slots, and the 3.5″ SATA/ SAS and some NVMe bays upfront, this becomes a very flexible building block covering a number of different use cases. Our STH Server Spider represents this deployment flexibility and general-purpose form factor.
Final Words
As a 2U platform, the Tyan Transport HX TS75-B8252 offers a familiar and flexible form factor for a number of markets. Tyan specifically mentions HPC applications in its marketing materials for the server, but it is built to handle more than that. For example, the -8X- version with eight NVIDIA T4 GPUs can add a lot of inferencing performance for applications such as video analytics.
The system itself has some great upgrades. For example, we like the tool-less drive trays, 3.5″ NVMe SSDs, and the addition of the Intel X550 10Gbase-T networking. We wish that the solution offered fewer chassis screws around the PCIe risers as that could make the system easier to work on. Thumbscrews here were a nice touch but they required a screwdriver for the first turn after the factory.
With dual AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” series CPUs, we get PCIe Gen4 in a system that has been deployed many quarters before Intel delivers Ice Lake Xeons with PCIe Gen4 support. For those that need the bandwidth for accelerators or simply just InfiniBand or Ethernet networking, the PCIe Gen4 support is very important. Many early EPYC systems were still Gen3 so this is actually a differentiator. Being able to configure the up to 64-core parts with cTDP of 240W allows a few percent better performance as we showed in our testing by simply setting the configuration in firmware. These days, AMD EPYC has more cores and up to 8TB of DRAM support in a dual-socket 2U server which is why AMD servers are becoming more popular.
The Tyan Transport HX TS75-B8252 exposes a delicate balance between providing high performance but also cost optimization. Even with those cost optimizations, the system has a surprising number of usability innovations that often do not add a lot of costs, but make working on the servers much easier. Overall the Tyan Transport HX TS75-B8252 is a solid 2U AMD EPYC platform that supports PCIe Gen4.
I come to STH to read server reviews. What keeps me staying is that I’m leaving feeling like I’ve learned more about the industry trends than anywhere else.