Ampere has demonstrated a waterproof computer with most of the case occupied by a cooling system that passively keeps the components within comfortable temperatures.
Designed for deployment in unconventional places, the 7StarLake TEC300S features a 128-core Arm server processor with eight channels of DDR4 RAM, as well as a decent amount of expansion capacity – and capacity for an Nvidia GPU.
There’s also room for four 2.5-inch SSDs, in addition to a VGA connector and four USB-3 ports. This is in addition to four Ethernet ports – including two 1GbE and two 10GbE ports, according to Serve the House.
The arm-powered waterproof PC
The Ampere 7StarLake TEC300S can be equipped with three variants of the powerful Ampere Altra or Altra Max CPUs, with 64, 96 and 128 cores.
These processors are typically deployed in servers in modern computing environments, from local IT infrastructure to public cloud servers. They can also be used in virtual machines (VMs).
The Ampere Altra Max is valued at over $4,000. For example, Oracle recently signed an agreement with Ampere to power its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) A2 instances with 320-core Ampere One CPUs. These will be used to power general purpose cloud workloads.
The device itself also has an IP65 rating, which means it has good waterproofing, and thanks to the passive cooling system that makes up the majority of the device, it can be deployed in a variety of situations, including in vehicles such as aircraft.
Ampere’s 7StarLake TEC300S can be equipped with up to 4TB of RAM, with transfer speeds of up to 3,200MT/s, while the graphics card is an RTX MXM A1000, which has 2,048 CUDA cores.
While it’s fit for purpose, it’s hardly one of the best graphics cards out there, and the raw performance of this Nvidia GPU is slightly lower than that of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, according to Notebook check.