CXL AI and Liquid Cooled Gigabyte Servers at Computex 2025

CXL AI and Liquid Cooled Gigabyte Servers at Computex 2025


Gigabyte B343 X40 AAS1 Front Angle
Gigabyte B343 X40 AAS1 Front Angle

At Computex 2025, we saw a lot of servers. Gigabyte’s booth had a good mix of them, including a few unique designs. We saw a neat CXL and NVMe server, along with liquid-cooled and air-cooled AI servers. There were even some neat multi-node servers, like a HPC-focused liquid-cooled 1U 2-node server and a 10-node 3U server.

Here is a quick 1-minute short on a few of the highlights:

Gigabyte R284-A91-AAL3 CXL and NVMe Server

Gigabyte showed off the R284-A91-AAL3 with two Intel Xeon 6900 series processors with a twist in this 2U E3.S platform.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front Angle
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front Angle

Using E3.S form factors, you can have both NVMe SSDs as well as up to sixteen Micron CXL memory expansion modules.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front CXL And E3.S NVMe Mix
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front CXL And E3.S NVMe Mix

In our photos, we saw the neat little CXL tray design. This is what the Micron CZ122 128GB CXL module goes into.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 CXL Tray
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 CXL Tray

Each Intel Xeon 6900 series CPU gets 12 memory channels plus eight additional CXL memory modules worth of capacity and bandwidth.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Dual Intel Xeon 6900
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Dual Intel Xeon 6900

There is more storage including dual M.2 slots on the motherboard of this 2U server.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Dual M.2
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Dual M.2

At the rear we get power supplies, OCP NIC slots, and riser slots, but there are two more 2.5″ bays at the rear for even more storage.

GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front To Rear Expansion
GIGABYTE R284 A91 AAL3 Front To Rear Expansion

There is certainly a lot going on in this server.

Gigabyte 4U AI Liquid-Cooled Servers

Gigabyte showed off a number of AI servers. Those included 4U 8x GPU compute servers that are liquid-cooled.

GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Front
GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Front

Gigabyte has a number of AI accelerator options but by using liquid cooling, these can only take 2U of rack space instead of 6-8U. As a result, the 4U servers can be stacked into dense AI racks. It may seem like a small feature, but the shorter profile of an AI accelerator coldplate versus a heatsink dramatically reduces the height of each system, allowing for copper DACs to be used instead of optical connections across more nodes. Those copper DACs decrease costs while increasing reliability.

GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Liquid Cooled AI GPUs
GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Liquid Cooled AI GPUs

This appears to be an Intel Xeon-based AI server with CoolIT liquid cooling that gives high-density compute, memory, and networking capabilities.

GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Liquid Cooled CPUs
GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Liquid Cooled CPUs

This is not a completely liquid cooled design. Instead, the main heat sources are liquid cooled. The DIMMs and SSDs for example, are still air cooled, but fewer fans can be used.

GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design CPU Tray Front
GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design CPU Tray Front

This is a design we have seen GIGABYTE use with many AI servers recently, but the a difference here is that foam blocks are inserted instead of some of the fans because cooling requirements are so much lower.

GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Front Fans And IO
GIGABYTE Liquid Cooled 4U Server Design Front Fans And IO

4U is a big deal since companies can put 8-10 in a modern AI rack and maximize density with 80 GPUs in a rack. It was neat to see the GIGABYTE GIGAPOD nodes like this at Computex.

Gigabyte G893-SG1-AAX1 Intel Gaudi 3 Server

In addition to the liquid cooled AI systems, we saw an air cooled Gigabyte Intel Gaudi 3 AI server.

GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Front
GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Front

A huge feature in this server is the eight OSFP ports. The Intel Gaudi 3 utilizes Ethernet for its scale-out. As a result, instead of NICs, the Ethernet comes from the OAM accelerator. We showed how NVIDIA is starting to migrate in the direction of Intel Gaudi.

GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 OSDP Ports For AI Accelerators
GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 OSFP Ports For AI Accelerators

This server has eight Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators in an OAM form factor that connect to those OSFP ports

GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Intel Gaudi 3 OAM Heatsinks
GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Intel Gaudi 3 OAM Heatsinks

There was the CPU host compute sled here as well with its 10GbE, management interfaces, and eight 2.5″ NVMe bays.

GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Top Compute Node I_O And Storage
GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 Top Compute Node I_O And Storage

Here is a quick look at GIGABYTE’s AI accelerator host CPU platform.

GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 CPU Compute Tray
GIGABYTE G893 SG1 AAX1 CPU Compute Tray

You can see that, like many other acceleration platforms, this is using the 8-channel memory Xeons instead of the 12-channel because it allows for 16 DIMMs per CPU or 32 DIMMs total.



Source link