Later this year Intel is set to introduce its Xeon 6-branded processors, codenamed Granite Rapids (6x00P) and Sierra Forest (6x00E). And with it will come a new slew of server motherboards and pre-built server platforms to go with it. On the latter note, this will be the first generation where Intel won’t be offering any pre-builts of its own, after selling that business off to MiTAC last year.

To that end, MiTAC and its subsidiary Tyan were at this year’s event to demonstrate what they’ve been up to since acquiring Intel’s server business unit, as well as to show off the server platforms they’re developing for the Xeon 6 family. Altogether, the companies had two server platforms on display – a compact 2S system, and a larger 2S system with significant expansion capabilities – as well as a pair of single-socket designs from Tyan.

The most basic platform that MiTAC had to show is their TX86-E7148 (Katmai Pass), a half-width 1U system that’s the successor to Intel’s D50DNP platform. Katmai Pass has two CPU sockets, supports up to 2 TB of DDR5-6400 RDIMMs over 16 slots (8 per CPU), and has two low-profile PCIe 5.0 x16 slots. Like its predecessor, this platform is aimed at mainstream servers that do not need a lot of storage or room to house bulky add-in cards like AI accelerators.

The company’s other platform is TX77A-E7142 (Deer Creek Pass), a considerably more serious offering that replaces Intel’s M50FCP platform. This board can house up to 4 TB of DDR5-6400 RDIMMs over 32 slots (16 per CPU with 2DPC), four PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 5.0 x8 slot, two OCP 3.0 slots, and 24 hot-swap U.2 bays. Deer Creek Pass can be used both for general-purpose workloads, high-performance storage, as well as workloads that require GPUs or other special-purpose accelerators.

Meanwhile Tyan had the single-socket Thunder CX GC73A-B5660 on display. That system supports up to 2 TB of DDR5-6400 memory over 16 RDIMMs and offers two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, two OCP 3.0 slots, and 12 hot-swappable U.2 drive bays.

Finally, Tyan’s Thunder HX S5662 is an HPC server board specifically designed to house multiple AI accelerators and other large PCIe cards. This board supports one Xeon 6 6700 processor, up to 1 TB of memory over eight DDR5-6400 RDIMMs, and has five tradiitonal PCIe 5.0 x16 slots as well as two PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slots for storage.

MiTAC is expected to start shipments of these new Xeon 6 motherboards in the coming months, as Intel rolls out its next-generation datacenter CPUs. Pricing of these platforms is unknown for now, but expect it to be comparable to existing servers.

One of the more subtle trends at this year’s Computex was that the majority of high-end motherboards now come equipped with a 5GbE network controller. At present, this might be considered a limited benefit as 5GbE and 10GbE switches and routers are still pretty expensive. But Realtek is planning on tackling the issue from both ends, as the company is preparing a hardware platform for sub-$100 5GbE switches. 

Realtek’s quad-port 5GbE switch platform consists of five key chips: one RTL9303 switch system-on-chip, and four RTL8251B 5GbE physical interfaces (PHYs). The chips are accompanied by various other components, such as power management ICs, but in general it relies solely on in-house developed components, which is why it can be made so cheap. 

RealTek’s platform is meant for home and small offices, which is reflected in the switch’s feature set. This is a simple, unmanaged switch with a handful of ports, making it ideal for linking up a few systems, while enterprise users will likely find it a bit too basic.

Segmenting the market like this is ultimately critical for bringing down the price of hardware. The bulk of 5GbE/10GbE switches on the market today are more enterprise-focused managed switches, which carry more features and a price premium to match. So developing a stripped-down platform for cheaper consumer switches is a huge development that should finally make it economical for consumers to adopt faster networking hardware, similar to 2.5GbE a few years ago.

At present, 2.5GbE switches are running at around $20/port, so RealTek’s sub-$100 target for a 4-port switch aims to bring 5GbE in at just a slightly higher price tag of $25/port. Or, compared to the handful of unmanaged 10GbE switches on the market, which average $60/port, this will be less than half the price (though at half the bandwidth).

The proliferation of cheap 5GbE network switches will also mark a notable inflection point in Ethernet hardware design, as it’s the fastest standard that is rated to work the ubiquitous Cat 5e cable. The NBASE-T standard was penned almost a decade ago in order to cover the missing-middle between 1GbE and 10GbE, while getting more bandwidth out of existing, widely-deployed Cat 5e cabling. So with the release of consumer 5GbE gear, the standard’s goals are finally coming to fruition – though it does mean we’re finally reaching the end of the road for the oldest network cabling still widely in use.

For now, Realtek is only talking about one customer offering a sub-$100 5GbE switch this September, but something tells me that other partners of the company will come up with similar devices soon enough. As a result of the competition, prices could get even lower, which is always good for buyers.

These benefits should also funnel into Wi-Fi 7 routers, to a limited extent. Wired backhaul speeds need to keep pace with ever-faster Wi-Fi standards in order to keep those newer radios fed, so it’s not a coincidence that cheaper 5GbE is finally coming right as Wi-Fi 7 is taking off.

Overall, the company’s 5GbE switch platform is part of a larger ecosystem of 5GbE hardware that Realtek was showing off at Computex. In addition to RTL8251B 5GbE PHYs and RTL9303 switch SoC, the company is also preparing their RTL8126 PCIe 3.1 network controller, and RTL8157 NIC for USB dongles.

While the market for high-end CPU coolers has decidedly shifted towards closed-loop all-in-one liquid coolers over the last several years, air cooling remains alive and well. Even at the high-end, there are still further improvements and innovations being made, such as DeepCool’s vapor chamber-based tower cooler, which was demonstrated at Computex.

Named the Assassin IV VC Vision, DeepCool’s design is an advanced concept vehicle that equips a tower cooled with both a vapor chamber in the base as well as has an LCD pad on top for extra flourish. The vapor chamber is said to increase the cooling capacity by 20W, adding a bit more of an edge to an already very powerful tower cooler design.

While we expect this one to come to market eventually, don’t be surprised if both vapor chamber and the screen to land on other products together or separately. For example, the massive DeepCool Assassin IV VC Vision has a more compact brother that has a screen and a vapor chamber.

The unit builds on top of the already monstrous DeepCool Assassin IV that comes with seven 0.6-mm heat pipes and can mount up to three 120/140mm fans, depending on installation (one is magnetically attached). With a weight of 1.575 kilograms – almost entirely copper and aluminum – this one is already good enough to cool down even the highest-performing CPUs.

DeepCool is currently trying to figure out recommended pricing for its Assassin IV VC Vision cooler, but the original Assassin IV costs $99.99, so expect the unit with a vapor chamber and a screen to build on top of that.

Just several years ago, we were impressed to witness a 2,000W power supply for mining systems at Computex. But with arrival or AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper WX and Intel’s Xeon W-3400-series – CPUs that can devour all the way to 900W under heavy loads – as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards (or, well, H100 PCIe for AI), 2,000W PSUs are no longer entirely overkill. As new processors have raised the bar on power consumption, so has the bar been raised on PSUs themselves. as evidenced by this year’s show, with several power supply manufacturers showing off new extreme PSU designs that go as high as 2,800W.

To that end, I will begin the story from the least ‘extreme’ PSU that I saw at Computex and this is Seasonic’s Prime PX-2200 80+ Platinum-badged ATX 3 PSU. The unit handled a custom-built AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX-based PC with 256 GB DDR5-4800 memory and four Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards without breaking a sweat at the trade show.

It is noteworthy that the Prime PX-2200 has only one 16-pin 12V-2×6 power connector for graphics cards, so Seasonic used adapters to power three out of four RTX 4090 boards.

Moving on to a more powerful PSU, which is Enermax’s Platimax 2400W 80+ Platinum-rated ATX 3.1 power supply. This one has two 12V-2×6 auxiliary power connectors for graphics cards, which is more than enough for an extreme gaming system. Enermax did not showcase this one in action at Computex, perhaps, because it is almost half of a year away and yet has to pass all the necessary tests.

The Enermax Platimax 2400W is set to enter mass production this December and will be available for $499, according to the company.

But what is 2,400W, if you can get all 2,800W? Well, Super Flower’s Leadex SF-2800F14HP 80+ Platinum-badged ATX 3.1 PSU can deliver 2,800W to a high-performance CPU and four graphics cards over five voltage rails. This power supply is well beyond what even a high-end desktop needs, and seems aimed more at workstation-style AI systems for research or on-prem inference. This one is expected to be available later this year for around $599, according to a representative at the booth.

It goes without saying that these extreme power supplies have a rather limited market. Not only because of the small base of systems that could ever need a PSU that could be measured as a multiple of horsepower (745W), but also because of outright mains compatibility – the standard US 15A/120V outlet can’t drive much more than a 1600W PSU. So power supplies like these are only readily usable in Europe, and in locations in the US with non-standard outlets. Then again, if you need a 2,800W PSU, you can probably afford the electrician needed to get one wired up.

Thanks to the success of the burgeoning market for AI accelerators, NVIDIA has been on a tear this year. And the only place that’s even more apparent than the company’s rapidly growing revenues is in the company’s stock price and market capitalization. After breaking into the top 5 most valuable companies only earlier this year, NVIDIA has reached the apex of Wall Street, closing out today as the world’s most valuable company.

With a closing price of $135.58 on a day that saw NVIDIA’s stock pop up another 3.5%, NVIDIA has topped both Microsoft and Apple in valuation, reaching a market capitalization of $3.335 trillion. This follows a rapid rise in the company’s stock price, which has increased by 47% in the last month alone – particularly on the back of NVIDIA’s most recent estimates-beating earnings report – as well as a recent 10-for-1 stock split. And looking at the company’s performance over a longer time period, NVIDIA’s stock jumped a staggering 218% over the last year, or a mere 3,474% over the last 5 years.

NVIDIA’s ascension continues a trend over the last several years of tech companies all holding the top spots in the market capitalization rankings. Though this is the first time in quite a while that the traditional tech leaders of Apple and Microsoft have been pushed aside.

Market Capitalization Rankings

 
Market Cap
Stock Price

NVIDIA
$3.335T
$135.58

Microsoft
$3.317T
$446.34

Apple
$3.285T
$214.29

Alphabet
$2.170T
$176.45

Amazon
$1.902T
$182.81

Driving the rapid growth of NVIDIA and its market capitalization has been demand for AI accelerators from NVIDIA, particularly the company’s server-grade H100, H200, and GH200 accelerators for AI training. As the demand for these products has spiked, NVIDIA has been scaling up accordingly, repeatedly beating market expectations for how many of the accelerators they can ship – and what price they can charge. And despite all that growth, orders for NVIDIA’s high-end accelerators are still backlogged, underscoring how NVIDIA still isn’t meeting the full demands of hyperscalers and other enterprises.

Consequently, NVIDIA’s stock price and market capitalization have been on a tear on the basis of these future expectations. With a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 76.7 – more than twice that of Microsoft or Apple – NVIDIA is priced more like a start-up than a 30-year-old tech company. But then it goes without saying that most 30-year-old tech companies aren’t tripling their revenue in a single year, placing NVIDIA in a rather unique situation at this time.

Like the stock market itself, market capitalizations are highly volatile. And historically speaking, it’s far from guaranteed that NVIDIA will be able to hold the top spot for long, never mind day-to-day fluctuations. NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft’s valuations are all within $50 billion (1.%) of each other, so for the moment at least, it’s still a tight race between all three companies. But no matter what happens from here, NVIDIA gets the exceptionally rare claim of having been the most valuable company in the world at some point.

(Carousel image courtesy MSN Money)

Western Digital expanded its WD Blue NVMe family of budget SSDs this week with the introduction of the the WD Blue SN5000 series, an updated lineup of SSDs that, among other things, adds a 4 TB model. Being budget drives, the SN5000 series is not going to be a performance monster, but their combination of capacity, reliability, and relatively low price could make them popular both among casual buyers and among enthusiasts looking for relatively cheap bulk solid-state storage.

Western Digital’s WD Blue SN500 NVMe drives come in an M.2-2280 form-factor and are based around an in-house WD controller (the company rarely discloses their codenames these days). WD’s controller is a 4 channel, DRAMless design, which is what we typically see for budget and mainstream SSDs. Externally, the controller supports a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection, and per WD’s specifications, even this budget drive should be fast enough to put the additional bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 to good use. All of the drives are single-sided, and are covered with a thin graphene heatspreader for heat dissipation.

More surprising here is WD’s choice of NAND. According to the company, they are using a mix of different generations and different types of NAND, depending on the model. The 500GB/1TB/2TB models are using WD/Kioxia’s older 112 layer BiCS 5 TLC NAND. Meanwhile the new 4TB capacity is being enabled with the company’s newer BiCS 6 NAND – but the QLC variety. All drive capacities are being backed by the same controller, so there is a thread of commonality between them, but at a high level WD seems to be using the higher performance of BiCS 6 to offset the switch from TLC to QLC.

WD Blue SN5000 SSD Specifications

Capacity
500 GB
1 TB
2 TB
4 TB

Controller
WD In-House: 4 Channel, DRAMless

NAND Flash
WD BiCS 5 TLC
WD BiCS 6 QLC

Form-Factor, Interface
Single-Sided M.2-2280, PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe

Sequential Read
5000 MB/s
5150 MB/s
5150 MB/s
5500 MB/s

Sequential Write
4000 MB/s
4900 MB/s
4850 MB/s
5000 MB/s

Random Read IOPS
460K
730K
650K
690K

Random Write IOPS
770K
800K

Peak Power
6.3W?

SLC Caching
Yes

TCG Pyrite Encryption
2.01

Warranty
5 Years

Write Endurance
300 TBW
0.33 DWPD
600 TBW
0.33 DWPD
900 TBW
0.24 DWPD
1200 TBW
0.16 DWPD

MSRP
$70
$80
$140
$280

When it comes to performance, the WD Blue SN5000 series drives are rated for read speeds between 5000 MB/sec and 5500 MB/sec depending on the capacity, while write speeds range from 4000 MB/sec to 5000 MB/sec. As for random performance, we are looking at up to 690K 4K IOPS random read speeds as well as up to 900K 4K IOPS random write speeds for the highest capacity model, while the lower-end 500 GB model is rated for 460K/770K 4K random read/write IOPS.

Overall, even with the 4TB model using QLC NAND, WD is touting it at offering better performance than any of the lower capacity models. We’re accustomed to seeing QLC drives come in behind TLC drives in this respect, so that newer generation of NAND is doing a lot of heavy lifting to put it ahead of the other models.

This goes for write endurance as well; the 4TB QLC model has the highest endurance rating, at 1200 TB written, followed by 900, 600, and 300 TBW for the lower capacity models respectively. Depending on the specific drive model, this works out to between 300 to 600 drive writes in total, or around 0.164 drive writes per day, which is typical for drives in this class.

Overall, the new drive family supplants WD’s previous generation of Blue drives, last year’s SN580 series. Comparatively, the SN5000 drives are rated to offer better sequential and random drive performance at every tier. And the the tiny 250GB drive has been dropped entirely, making room for the new high-capacity 4TB model at the high-end while the 500GB drive model is the new entry-level capacity.

While the WD Blue SN5000 NVMe family seems to be well positioned to be a low-cost drives meant to compete aggressively on the pricing, for now WD’s launch prices are a bit ambitious. The $70 price tag for the 500 GB version is pretty typical, while the $280 recommended price for a 4TB model puts it in a weird spot between a number of other 4TB drives. The tad slower Crucial P3 Plus 4TB can be found for $217, while WD’s own considerably faster WD_Black SN850X 4TB is only $30 more, at $310. Ultimately, given that Western Digital’s Blue drives are meant to be inexpensive SSDs, we expect retail drive prices to catch up with market realities shortly.