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

Keeping the server cool are a total of five 80 mm fans. The server during idle and light loads was very quiet and even when fully engaging a 128-core Ampere Altra Max it continued to not be too noisy compared to some other 2U servers.

For BMC access, the Gigabyte server makes use of AMI's MegaRAC SP-X on the ASpeed AST2500 controller. Yes we would love to see OpenBMC being used by more server motherboards, but MegaRAC SP-X does work well and very common.

All the usual features are accessible from MegaRAC SP-X just as you would typically find on x86_64 servers, including an HTML5 KVM/viewer and the ability to easily update the firmware from the BMC web interface. On the Ampere Computing side they do support OpenBMC, LinuxBoot, and Coreboot to varying degrees.

Gigabyte officially lists operating system compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2+, Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04 / 22.04 LTS, Fedora Server 33 and newer, Oracle Linux 8, and Debian 10.9 and newer. As mentioned trying out Fedora, Ubuntu 22.04/23.10, and others have all worked without any issues to deal with given the now mature state of AArch64 Linux images.