Hello and welcome. I'm Trisha Hershberger, and we are in Newegg Studios with
Dwight and Kyung from Supermicro. Welcome guys.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here today.
Now Dwight, you've been here with us before, and Kyung you're a
first-timer, so to start things off can you both let the audience know what you
do with Supermicro.
Well, I am a Product Manager for Supermicro, specializing in
AMD motherboards and...
I am Kyung Park. I am a System Product Manager, focused on AMD based product lines.
Excellent, and neither of you had to travel too far to
get here because Supermicro is based in Silicon Valley, correct?
It is. Same time zone.
So this is sort of a part two interview since Dwight was here along
with Michael from AMD back in August?
Yeah something like that
Yeah, back in August to talk about their
collaboration with some of AMD's latest EPYC Rome Server CPUs, pre-installed into
Supermicro motherboards, which there was a lot of excitement around that new launch.
How has it all been going for Supermicro since then?
The customer interest has not faded away.
Product deliveries have definitely picked up.
Yeah, I think we're in the dawn of a new age.
I like that.
The dawn of a new age.
Very exciting.
So let's talk a little bit more about the latest technology and what the
latest technology allows now that these products have been in the field for a little while.
All those cores and 128 lanes.
So what does that allow users to do better than they could before?
With twice the number of the cores in a higher frequency of CPUs, that allows for a
faster and a bigger memory footprint. So there's a lot of product lines that are
out there in the market, but for our side the previous generations they had a
lot of lanes and then today they also have the same PCIe lanes
they can be able to enhance the workload for the customers. So I think that's
probably one of the main focuses today. So I think basically from Naples to Rome
from the first gen to second gen EPYC server processors, we've gone from the
largest number of cores in the industry 32 to twice that. You know, 64 per socket.
They've also gone from pretty fast memory to the fastest memory available
currently, which is 3200 MHz. And yeah I mean it's quite the big leap.
It is. That's a huge leap to make in one generation. So what kind of optimizing is
necessary for users to take advantage of what AMD's Rome CPUs can do? Well it's
not necessarily in optimization I think, it's a more of a differences between the
Naples and Rome CPU itself. So one of the biggest key
takeaways from the Rome CPUs are the CPU core count. It's actually doubling. And
then because the PCIe is coming from the gen 3 to gen 4 the
memory speed gets boosted up to 3200. So because of those reasons, in order
for you to take it full advantage of the Rome product lines we have to build
different motherboards to accommodate all the features that Rome is providing
to the world. Well, thank you so much for accommodating so that we can all get the
best of it. Yeah it's just actually basically two big things that happen
with Rome. We went to PCIe gen 4 and in order to support that, the new
optimized platforms have to have actually a new material for the circuit
boards itself, right. We also have to use different connectors and whatnot to
allow it to operate a PCIe Gen 4 speeds. Now to support the fastest memory
possible 3200 MHz, we are actually able to do that for both boards that were
designed for the first generation processors and those that are optimized for the
second gen. That's actually not an easy feat but we're able to do that so
regardless of which Supermicro board that you choose, you know with a Rome
processor you will be able to run at the fastest memory speed currently available.
Very exciting. Supermicro has a pretty huge product line. Can you take us
through some specific highlights that you're particularly excited about right now?
So right now in Q4, a lot of people are interested in a Rome
based platform, so all our customers are talking about Gen 4, a higher core
count, bigger and faster memory speed. So all those have been a great, you know,
focal point so that for our side we have some kind of servers or broad range of
servers that can be able to accommodate all that.
So Twin Pro, for example. So this particular one as an example, it's a
multi-node 2U form factor where your four different servers are inside in the
chassis. That can be able to accommodate a lot of core counts and then a lot of
memory, so that people who are able to use compute intensive applications or
whatnot can be able to use something like this moving forward. So key features
on this particular product line is that this aggregated design on the networking
port where we can be able to swap out the networking portions so that
customers do not have to change the entire motherboard. So that's one of the key
features on this particular product line. On the Ultra side for an example, this
basically is everything that the Rome has offered to the market we migrated
and implemented into this particular server. What I mean by that is it has two sockets,
has cores up to 128 cores, up to 256 threads of the
CPUs. And on top of that, it has a two dimm support channel design.
32 dimm slots can be able to accommodate up to eight terabytes of memory. So because of
of that, a lot of customers who are looking for memory intensive workloads or
the computer intensive workloads or even the virtualization can be able to take a
good advantage of servers like this. You're right and that's your flagship
solution yes? Correct. Awesome. Well let me give you some juicy bits here.
I like juicy bits let's do it. All right now, take a look at this thing all right.
This is 3 1/2" thick. It's two rack units, 3 1/2" thick for
this twin pro solution here. Within this we have four you know separate computers
if you will, for notes ok, and each one of them can have a 64 core processor.
What that means is that in this little thing that is thinner than many
briefcases really, you can have up to 256 cores, 512 treads. Now if that's not
enough for you, we actually have a solution that allows you to have eight
processors, 512 cores, 1024 threads, in that size.
So on the WIO side is it's a cost-effective single socket solution. It's usually for
general purpose usages, so when it's a Rome optimized everybody's talking
about gen 4, so this particular one can be able to accommodate up to three
PCI gen 4 links or a lot of customers who's looking for an Io
intensive workloads as well. So now moving forward to the our workstations,
so this is a basically another standard up form factor solution that is
mainly geared towards the GPU users. GPU users who are into like AI or
some kind of rendering, people like those can be able to use something like that
to take advantage of our tower. And at the same time this is a rack mountable,
so that people don't have to put that on the side of their desk, they can
actually mounted into the rack itself. Mainstream servers are another
standard form factor servers that are basically for an integrated ASUS version of
the mainstream so that people don't need to buy separate cards to accommodate the connectors.
Great! We just went through so much, thank you.
With products like those, who are your typical customers and clients?
Well, so our customers vary from you know the high-performance computing, to GPU
users. So customers who are looking for like a desktop version or something like
densities or something that has a
one-year two-year form factors with a lot of a core counts and whatnot.
So there's a lot of customers out there, but we are mainly focusing on customers
that are into high performance computings and are GPU users, or even
general purpose usage customers.
Well generally you see when
a home user buys a computer, or even a professional buys a computer,
it usually sits on the desk, or sits next to the desk or sits it's under the desk
and you have one computer. Right. But in a data center when you buy a
server it typically sits on a rack and sometimes they have like 30 servers on a
single rack, and a lot of racks in a single data center. It's a completely
different environment if you will. A lot of focus is on getting the
most amount of computing power into the smallest amount of space, and a
solution that can run 24/7, a solution that is reliable in that environment,
that is dependable, and which is so visible and remotely manageable. Which is
why one of the things that sets servers apart from home computers and
professional workstations is that they almost always have what is called a
Baseboard Management Controller on the server itself so that an administrator
from a remote location can remotely manage,
power cycle, monitor and do all those things that he needs to do on not one, not
two, not twenty, but potentially thousands of servers.
Right.
Now do your desktop solutions have that as well?
Well desktop solutions typically don't,
but this workstation is actually based off a server motherboard, so it
actually does. So for system administrators were looking for you know,
if you are deploying a bunch of servers or a bunch of workstations in particular
case right then you will have the ability to remotely basically manage all
those systems. Very cool. Here's the thing just let's talk about networking
for instance. Now Gigabit Ethernet is almost ubiquitous with networking
for any office or home uses, but in a server environment we're not talking
about Gigabit Ethernet, but actually more often than not talking about 10 Gigabit
Ethernet, 25 Gigabit Ethernet, 100 Gigabit Ethernet you know or InfiniBand which is
Mellon offices standard for high bandwidth networking at 100
Gigabits or 200 Gigabits and that is quite a far cry from what is typical in
a home or office environment. Yes. Before we let you guys go can you give us a little
taste of what's coming up in the future for Supermicro, maybe some 2020
predictions? Yes, so 2020 is a key year for Solid State Drives. Moving forward
something like U.2 Gen 4 devices for NVMes or something like a GPU
product lines, so we are very excited to welcome 2020.
Yeah so AMD's a little bit a bit ahead of the curve here. They've moved to PCIe Gen 4 this year, but next
year is where we'll see the big transformation whereby all the cards and
you know networking cards, Solid State Drives,
GPU cards and whatnot move to PCI Gen 4, which is twice as fast as the current
Gen 3 standards. And another thing that we will bring out actually before 2020
mmm before 2020, is we will have a server
that will allow you to have eight PCIe by 16 GPU cards
in a single server. That one you won't have to wait for 2020.
I love it! Big things a comin'. That is so exciting.
Dwight, Kyung, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
You out there watching make sure that you check out
the links in the description below for the full line of Supermicro products on Newegg.