GIGABYTE G383-R80-AAP1 AMD Instinct MI300A Server Review

3
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 AMD Instinct MI300A 6
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 AMD Instinct MI300A 6

Sometimes, you just get to take apart cool servers. A few months ago They Let Me Bring a Camera Into a Top Classified US Supercomputer, El Capitan. That top-end supercomputer uses AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, combining CPU and GPU cores from AMD’s EPYC and Instinct lines along with HBM3 memory to make perhaps the fastest APU around. The GIGABYTE G383-R80-AAP1 takes four of those MI300A APUs and puts them into a system that you can buy and run without having to buy a cluster with tens of thousands of nodes. In the process, this is a very neat server that we wanted to review.

For this one, we have a short video that you can find here:

As a quick note, we looked at this system earlier this year in Taiwan so we have to say this is sponsored. Let us get into the system.

GIGABYTE G383-R80-AAP1 External Hardware Overview

The system comes in a really neat form factor at 3U and 950mm (around 37.4in) deep. If you were wondering, those handles come in handy when moving the server.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Angle 1
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Angle 1

The front of the server has cooling on the bottom and then storage and I/O on the top 1U.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front

Taking a look at the cooling, we can see that the fans occupy the bottom 2U portion of the chassis and are designed to draw cool air into the APU heatsinks.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Fans
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Fans

Storage is provisioned through eight 2.5″ NVMe drive bays.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Storage
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Storage

Here is a quick look at the drive backplane which is cabled for each x4 drive.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 NVMe Backplane
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 NVMe Backplane

The other main feature is the front I/O. Here we have two 10GbE NIC ports via a Broadcom BCM57416.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO

The front I/O board is really neat in how it is designed with M.2 storage and more. This area also has the USB ports, VGA, and management LAN port.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO Board
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO Board

The rear is quite far away and has something a bit unexpected.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Rear Overview
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Rear Overview

There are four 3kW PSUs. Compared to the big 8x GPU servers, this is a relatively lower power machine which is fun to think about.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 3kW PSU Hot Swap
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 3kW PSU Hot Swap

The rest of the rear is a series of PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. These are arranged in four dual width and four single width slots.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 1
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 1

These are cabled into the machine on small PCIe boards.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 2
GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 2

This is probably crazy, but something I thought would be really interesting to someone would be adding four 400Gbps NICs, one per APU, and then four double-width accelerators or CXL PCIe cards. Originally the MI300 series was supposed to support CXL, we saw pre-release samples where it did, but that seems to have fallen out of the feature list between the prototypes we saw and the shipping products. Still, it would be a neat application if ever AMD enabled it.

Next, let us get inside the server to see how it works.

3 COMMENTS

  1. From the first page,

    “Compared to the big 8x GPU servers, this is a relatively lower power machine which is fun to think about.”

    Something else that’s fun to think about is a single one of these chips in HPC-dev workstations. Any indication that we might see something like a DGX Station (GB300 Grace Blackwell) from AMD?

    Has the time come once again for serious fp64?

  2. I appreciate this article, but this is fun to think about instead, the SuperMicro GPU A+ Server AS -4126GS-NMR-LCC with 8 Instinct MI350 (8 x 288GB of HBM3E mem) and 2 EPYC 9005 series supporting 24 DIMM 6TB memory in 4U.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.