Comments on: NVIDIA AX800 High-End Arm Server on a PCIe Card

By: abufrejoval

abufrejoval — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 02:38:19 +0000

I guess these are basically designed for passive PCI[e] backplane systems which hark back to S100 or VME bus systems for industrial use or simply predate “motherboards”, which are a microcomputer invention.

I guess the main disadvantage is that you can’t use these to build your own home-brew DGX and that they are really designed for the most advanced edge AI surveillance inference systems they seem to run in Mellanox’ home country.

There have been plenty of CPU plug-in boards for PCs over the decades, even including a small IBM mainframe at one point. But just putting one of these in a server might not get you very far as the motherboard and this “add-in” card may not agree on who is the PCIe root.

By: Olin

Olin — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 03:29:45 +0000

emerth brings up a good point which is does the card run it’s own operating system. In the specs it says “40GB eMMC boot drive” which seems to imply that it’s capable of running an operating system. If it was just scratch storage it would not say boot drive.

By: ssnseawolf

ssnseawolf — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 03:22:19 +0000

@Kevin G If I recall correctly, all three bridges must be connected to the same sibling. Using one card’s three NVLink bridges to connect to more than one sibling isn’t a supported configuration. Standard A100s also have three NVLink bridges.

By: Kevin G

Kevin G — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 18:08:49 +0000

The lack of coverage is likely due to nVidia being mainly focused on Hopper and Grace generation of parts. I would expect a refresh of this using the newer generation parts to arrive in 12-18 months. The real question is if the next generation arrives before Hopper’s replacement.

What is interesting is that this card does have three nvLink interfaces which presumably can link to three other cards like this or three A100 PCIe cards. What is interesting is that while BlueField has direct access to the A100, mixing this with a normal A100 would also add the host system into the mix. Essentially room for some interesting heterogenous computing and memory mapping topologies.

By: emerth

emerth — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 18:07:46 +0000

Does it run it’s own OS image separate from the host server?

At some point nV has to just give up on the PCIe appendage and admit these things are servers outright. What am I missing?