Supermicro MicroCloud with 8x AMD Ryzen AM5 Nodes at Computex 2023

Jan 14, 2024

Many of our readers are already familiar with the Supermicro MicroCloud. The MicroCloud is popular in web and dedicated hosting markets where sharing the chassis, power, and cooling are desired while still maintaining physical nodes. At Computex 2023, the STH team saw the new AMD AM5 version of the MicroCloud designed to fit 8x AMD Ryzen nodes into a single chassis.

The system itself is the upcoming Supermicro AS-3015MR-H8TNR. This is a 3U chassis (CSE-938NH-R2K20BP2) with sixteen 3.5″ front bays.

Each node gets two of these 3.5″ bays.

On the rear of the unit, we can see two 2.2kW power supplies, one on either side. There is also a shared IPMI management interface.

The main feature, however, is the node array. There are a total of eight single-socket AMD Ryzen AM5 nodes.

Each Supermicro AMD AM5 Ryzn node is based around a H13SRD-F motherboard and are identical.

They also have LOMs called Supermicro MicroLP that can offer 1GbE, 10GbE, or 25GbE connectivity options.

In addition to that, each node gets its I/O over a high-density custom connector.

There is a single PCIe x16 slot in each node, but this is a PCIe Gen5 x16 slot. There is also a M.2 slot onboard.

One of the biggest, and most interesting differences between this and solutions like the 1U AMD Ryzen Server we reviewed is the CPU. Supermicro says the MicroCloud can support up to 170W TDP. Other boards on the market, or that will be on the market soon have a maximum TDP of closer to 105-120W.

With the AMD Ryzen 7000 series we get up to 16 cores and two memory channels. In 2DPC mode, that means four DIMM channels and up to 128GB of ECC or non-ECC DDR5 DIMM memory.

Supermicro also has two SATA ports onboard near the high-density connector.

Each server is easy to swap out in the MicroCloud.

The MicroCloud has been very popular with hosting providers. We saw them in our recent Putting the Bare Metal Server in the PhoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud piece. The ability to swap nodes in and out of the chassis quickly makes operations much more streamlined.

For those that think of these as blades, this is not a MicroBlade chassis. The MicroBlade has onboard network switches built-in. Still, these take advantage of shared chassis, cooling, and power supplies to lower per-node costs.

We are hoping to get one of these to review in the next few weeks since they look very cool.