Gigabyte G242-P36: A Great Ampere Altra Max Platform For AI/GPU Computing

The past two months I've been using the Gigabyte (Giga Computing) G242-P36 and it's been a refreshing delight for an ARM64 server platform running well with the mature Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors while boasting support for up to two GPUs and up to two DPUs or other PCIe adapters to make for a nice GPU/AI accelerated computing server.

In the absence of AmpereOne servers being widely available and those next-generation Ampere processors just targeting above 128+ cores, the Ampere Altra family is still an ideal candidate for those pursuing an AArch64 server. The Gigabyte G242-P36 barebones server has been a delight to use and far more stable and reliable than the Ampere Mount Jade reference server originally premiering with the Ampere Altra processors way back in 2020. The Gigabyte G242-P36 hardware and firmware has been reliable and robust without any annoying quirks or other troubles to worry about it like with the reference boards or other early ARM products. Using the G242-P36 was a trouble-free experience.

At Phoronix with benchmarking ARM Linux going back to the days of Calxeda to solar-powered ARM clusters to the original Ampere eMAG, it's been a long and wild journey with how the ARM Linux support has grown and matured for servers. Setting up and deploying the Gigabyte G242-P36 with Ampere Altra Max proved as easy as any x86_64 server build and these days having little to worry about on the software side. There still are some open-source projects still not well optimized/tuned for AArch64 compared to x86_64 but these days the NEON use and other modern AArch64 capabilities are being more widely leveraged than some years ago.

With the maturity of the open-source AArch64 Linux ecosystem, the Linux distribution support is also very robust and better off -- and more performant -- than years ago. Trying out Fedora, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, and others on the G242-P36 all worked nicely out-of-the-box without any compatibility issues or other problems to note.

The G242-P36 is advertised as supporting up to two NVIDIA H100 PCIe graphics cards or equivalent, up to two NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs, 16 DDR4 RDIMM/LRDIMMs for the single Ampere Altra / Altra Max LGA-4926 socket, dual Gigabit LAN ports, four 2.5-inch NVMe hot-swappable bays, and two M.2 slots. For the PCIe Gen4 x16 connectivity there are two FHFL PCIe Gen4 x16 slots and two LP PCIe Gen4 x16 slots for DPUs or other low-profile/low-power cards. Plus there are two LP PCIe Gen4 x8 slots on the rear side as well.

The G242-P36 barebones has redundant 1600W 80 PLUS Platinum power supplies for easily feeding the Ampere Altra (Max) and plenty of drives and add-in cards.

The connectivity and expansion options are nice for the G242-P36. Considering this is an AI / GPU focused barebones server, it would have been nice to see at least some 10 GbE connectivity by default rather than just Gigabit Ethernet with this server but a PCIe adapter can be easily added as well. More details on all of the base specs for the G242-P36 can be found via Gigabyte.com.