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

The Ampere Altra Max M128-30 CPU power consumption reported by its HWMON kernel driver showed an average power consumption of 120 Watts during the span of 19 hours with 114 benchmarks run. During idle periods the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 consumed as little as 21 Watts while the reported peak was 285 Watts, according to the HWMON driver.

When looking at the overall system power consumption as reported via IPMI, on average this Ampere Altra (Max) server platform with the 128-core processor and 16 x 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory was consuming 261 Watts on average and a peak recorded system power consumption of 673 Watts -- without any graphics cards or other extra accelerators/DPUs. During the brief periods of idle time the overall system power consumption was as little as 121 Watts.

The G242-P36 server with its stock cooler and fans were able to keep the Ampere Altra Max running cool at an average of 61 degrees under load and a peak of 84 degrees albeit was rare for it to hit that besides the most extreme scenarios. During idle it went as low as 35 degrees.

Overall I am quite pleased with the G242-P36 barebones server platform for those after a 2U server for running Ampere Altra or Ampere Altra Max AArch64 server processors. The platform is quite robust, can handle up to two GPUs and two DPUs or other PCIe accelerators, and all around is another great offering from Gigabyte / Giga Computing. The server has been quite reliable in all of the benchmarks I've been stressing it with the past two months and will also have some further follow-up benchmarks using this platform over the coming weeks. Pricing is quite reasonable for the G242-P36 with some Internet retailers selling it for around $5.9k with a Ampere Altra Q64-30 and 8 x 16GB DDR4-3200 memory base configuration while at other retailers the barebones server configuration appears to retail for around $3.2k for this 2U platform with redundant 1600W 80+ Platinum power supplies and great build quality we've come to enjoy from Gigabyte servers.

Thanks to Giga Computing supplying the G242-P36 review sample for testing at Phoronix. More information on this platform is available at Gigabyte.com.