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Supermicro unveiled an Arm-based server – the ARS-210M-NR – in December 2022 and Servethehome took it for a spin, load it with four Nvidia A16 cards. The test server shipped with a 128-core Ampere Altra Max Arm processor, running at 3 GHz, with 16 DDR4 memory modules (512 GB total memory), two 25 GbE-compliant SPF28 ports, 16 2.5-inch bays and a pair of 2 kW power supplies, all nicely mounted in a tool-less chassis.
The icing on the cake is the quartet of Ampere-based Nvidia A16 graphics cards. Each card comes with 64 GB of GDDR6 ECC memory and four GPUs sitting on a full-height, dual-slot, passively cooled circuit board. The A16 isn’t the most powerful data center card Nvidia has; that would be the A100; however, it hits a sweet spot for service providers looking to get the maximum number of concurrent users on a single board.
In terms of pure performance, each of these GPUs has half the number of CUDA cores of the Geforce RTX 3050 so yes it should be able to run the legendary Crysis game without too much of a problem which means that you could theoretically have 16 iterations of one of the most taxing games ever run concurrently. You just need to make 16 virtual machines and load 16 copies of Crysis.
No pricing details were provided, but given that the A16 retails for around $3,000 and a fully loaded server with similar credentials costing around $10,000, you’d be expected to pay north of $22,000 for such a system.
Stream to the cloud
Who would need such dissolute power? For starters, cloud gaming is now mainstream (even if Google came out earlier this year when it was mothballed). Stages) and it’s the ARS-210M-NR that make it a reality.
However, apart from this, it is about VDI (Video Desktop Infrastructure) for businesses and enterprises. The rise of hybrid works acted as a catalyst for the adoption of Virtual Workstation (and virtual pc) as work from home become a reality for millions of users. And only one of these servers can host many VMs (virtual machines); a recent test by cloud computing company Nutanix showed that two Nvidia A16 graphics cards can run 128 virtual machines, which means four cards should be able to run 256.
Of course, you may need to use a more powerful CPU than the Altra Max and also more memory (Nutanix used 1.5 TB of RAM and two Intel Xeon Gold 6354, each with 18 physical cores). Increasing SaaS support for virtual GPU for a wide range of applications (eg Photoshop or Chrome) explains why dense servers with a very high number of GPUs are becoming a common occurrence.
Other applications such as web hosting can take advantage of a high number of CPU cores, that’s why VPS (virtual private servers) are now so affordable with the price difference with dedicated servers and bare metal solutions remain high.
Servethehome ran the 2U server ubuntu and while the experience wasn’t as smooth as it could be, it was well worth it. Arm is slowly turning into a formidable opponent to both Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Epyc and with Amazon launching the fourth generation of its Gravity CPU family, there’s never been a better time to try Arm.