Russian Manufacturer Launches Servers with Domestic CPUs, but GPUs Require Separate Purchase

Russian server manufacturer Graviton has announced the launch of its first AI and HPC (High-Performance Computing) servers equipped with domestically developed Russian processors. These servers support up to 8 compute GPUs for handling artificial intelligence and supercomputing workloads.

The model S2124B offers a 48-core processor with a clock speed of only 2GHz and utilizes DDR4-3200 memory. Based on the core count and frequency, it is likely that this is the Baikal Electronics BE-S1000 server chip from Russian CPU manufacturer Baikal Electronics.

The BE-S1000 server chip, developed based on the ARM architecture, features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores and supports 2-way or 4-way SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) configurations. However, this processor has a frequency of 2.5GHz.

It is possible that Baikal Electronics has underclocked the server chips supplied to Graviton. Originally, the BE-S1000 was planned to be manufactured by TSMC, but due to sanctions, TSMC was unable to continue production, forcing Baikal Electronics to switch to alternative production nodes.

Graviton has not disclosed the types of GPUs that can be installed in the S2124B servers. However, given that these servers are intended for AI workloads, the GPUs are likely NVIDIA's AI accelerator cards.

Due to sanctions, Russian companies are unable to directly purchase NVIDIA's AI accelerator cards, which might be why Graviton has not disclosed the GPU types, suggesting that interested buyers consult privately and find their own ways to acquire these GPUs.

In addition to supporting dual CPUs and 8 GPUs, the S2124B also offers 12 SATA ports for mechanical hard drives and 12 NVMe U.3 ports for U.3 type solid-state drives.