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

I've been using the G242-P36 with Ampere Altra Max for a few articles already on Phoronix. Published so far has included a comparison of Ampere Altra Max to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon for those wanting a fresh look there. Ampere Altra Max still stands up well when it comes to competitive power efficiency. I've also shown how the Ubuntu AArch64 Linux performance continues to evolve with Ubuntu 23.10 typically outperforming Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, which is good news ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS coming up in April. There will be some other Ampere benchmark articles coming up on Phoronix too using this Gigabyte platform thanks to Gigabyte letting me to continue to use this server platform for more Ampere Altra (Max) benchmarking.

From those articles you can get an idea for the competitive comparison of Ampere Altra Max 128-core (Ampere Altra Max M128-30) against the AMD/Intel competition and the power efficiency. I didn't bother comparing the G242-P36 to the Ampere Mount Jade reference server since there's simply no comparison: the retail product (G242-P36) is far superior given the much more mature firmware and engineering compared to that early Ampere reference platform from 2020.

For those wondering about the power and thermals with the G242-P36, I've run some benchmarks there. I ran a wide range of AI, HPC, code compilation, and other server workloads over the span of 19 hours while monitoring various vitals. Every second the CPU socket power consumption, server power consumption via IPMI, and CPU core temperature were monitored for the Ampere Altra Max on Ubuntu 23.10 with this Giga Computing platform.