Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne Server With R13SPD Motherboard

To much delight, the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR ships with OpenBMC for the open-source BMC firmware stack. Great seeing all the OpenBMC interest these days and the increasing industry interest in open-source firmware at large.

Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are officially supported by the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR while as noted during the AmpereOne testing at Phoronix, all of the AArch64 Linux distributions I tried ended up working fine on this AmpereOne platform.

While the first and only AmpereOne server I have been able to test thus far, the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR worked out well in the few weeks it was through rigorous testing and benchmarking at Phoronix. It's a comprehensive feature set for a nice 1P AArch64 server able to handle up to 192 cores. Though with how long it's taken for AmpereOne to come to market, it's a very different time than if there was real availability a year or two ago. Now AmpereOne is running up against Intel Xeon 6 Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, AMD EPYC Bergamo being available since last year, and the upcoming EPYC Turin launch.

For those looking explicitly for an AArch64 on-premise server, AmpereOne is the leading candidate given lack of choices. Ampere Altra remains available in retail channels but is showing its age with DDR4 support and being a four year old platform. So you may be wondering about the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR pricing and availability... Unfortunately, I don't have anything to add. The Supermicro product page as of writing continues to list this AmpereOne server as "coming soon" and the pricing redirects to a form for a quote submission. Supermicro wasn't able to provide me any pricing information since the AmpereOne servers aren't yet available in their eStore. For availability they say the ARS-211M-NR will be available by the middle of September and ARS-211ME-FN in early October. We also still haven't seen AmpereOne processors available individually yet from any online retailers. So how broad AmpereOne processor availability is and how close to the list pricing remains to be seen.

In any event thanks to Ampere Computing for having sent out this Supermicro server for a few weeks of benchmarking. Those wanting to learn more about this AmpereOne 2U server can do so at Supermicro.com.

Among the tests over the past few weeks were AmpereOne A192-32X benchmarks, AmpereOne core scaling from 32 to 192 CPU cores, AmpereOne 4K vs. 64K Linux kernel page size comparison, AWS Graviton4 vs. AmpereOne performance, CentOS Stream 10 testing, GCC vs. LLVM Clang AArch64 compiler performance, AmpereOne CPPC CPUFreq Schedutil vs. Performance governors, and finding the fastest AArch64 Linux distribution on AmpereOne.