Today Ampere discussed its new server processor roadmap, including the new AmpereOne processors in its annual update. Server CPUs are on the verge of a complete revolution. For more than a decade, the standard server CPU is a big performance core with SMT/ hyper-threading. That core was designed to do everything well from web serving to HPC calculations. We are at the point where that is basically too much, and leading the charge in the opposite direction is Ampere.
This week at the OCP Regional Summit 2023 in Prague that STH attended, there were a number of cool hardware platforms. One was an O-RAN concept from Nokia that was liquid-cooled and even the new Nokia Cloud RAN SmartNIC was on display.
Nokia Shows Off Liquid Cooled O-RAN Concept
At the regional summit, we saw this box which looks a lot like other O-RAN boxes that we have seen, except for there being a notable difference in the nodes. This single socket (Intel Xeon Ice Lake generation) node had liquid cooling.
Single socket in this market is more common since it allows for more nodes in space-constrained areas. We even recently looked at a Supermicro ARS-210ME-FNR 2U Edge Ampere Altra Max Arm Server that was a single 2U single socket node to lower power and decreases performance variability from socket-to-socket communication. Nokia seems to be looking at the challenge of density with liquid cooling.
The liquid cooling block was made by EK. We thought this would be a big win for EK so we asked if this is a production platform, but it is still a prototype.
The short internal loops have quick disconnect connectors at the rear of the node.
This is really interesting since there is an in-chassis manifold that each node plugs into making it fully front serviceable.
Last year we did a How Liquid Cooling Servers Works with Gigabyte and CoolIT if you want to learn more about how liquid cooling works and all of the parts that go into solutions like this. We used a much higher power node than Nokia is using.
Nokia’s solution currently only cools the CPUs, so it still has fans for the other components. The goal was to cool the largest heat source to improve efficiency.
A Vietnamese retailer has listed a slew of GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards from various brands. The surplus of trademarks and models can obviously point to plenty of hardware at launch, which is allegedly several days away. However, pricing for these add-in-boards — which start at ~$800 — seems rather high.
MikroTik has a new 25GbE/ 100GbE switch, and it is very similar to what we have already reviewed on STH. The MikroTik CRS510-8XS-2XQ-IN has eight 25GbE ports and two 100GbE ports along with another ridiculous array of power options.
A new variant of the notorious Mirai botnet has been found leveraging several security vulnerabilities to propagate itself to Linux and IoT devices.
Observed during the second half of 2022, the new version has been dubbed V3G4 by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which identified three different campaigns likely conducted by the same threat actor.
"Once the vulnerable devices are compromised, they will be fully controlled by attackers and become a part of the botnet," Unit 42 researchers said. "The threat actor has the capability to utilize those devices to conduct further attacks, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks."
Asus places the Promontory 21 chipset on a PCIe card.
While AMD's top-of-the-range X670E chipset for AM5 motherboards offers expandability by allowing daisy-chaining of the chipsets, it is rather hard to build a Mini-ITX motherboard featuring this dual-chip core logic. But it looks like Asus has found a solution: its ROG Strix X670E-I motherboard for AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors places the second chipset chip (Promontory 21) on an add-on PCIe card, as shown in an image published by Uniko's Hardware.
Five years after debuting at CES 2018, Hyundai’s e-Corner technology is closer to reality. Following its most recent appearance at CES 2021, the system was on display at last week’s show. And this time around, rather than building a dedicated prototype to showcase the tech, the automaker’s Mobis arm instead integrated e-Corner into an Ioniq 5 EV.
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