A server blade from the upcoming El Capitan supercomputer was shown off at the ISC High Performance event in Hamburg, Germany. The server blade's front cover was stripped off, revealing all of the internal components — including the extremely potent AMD Instinct MI300A APU.
This is the second time we've seen El Capitan's MI300A's compute chips in all their glory. The blade itself, dubbed the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX255a accelerator blade, consists of a single-slot 1U blade chassis. But in that small size it manages to pack a whopping eight MI300A chips. That's a densely packed setup, featuring copper cooling blocks with copper cooling pipes linking everything together.
Naturally, each blade utilizes liquid cooling to help deal with the immense amount of heat used by the eight APUs. Each MI300A APU has a TDP rating of 550W, with a peak power rating of 760W. That means the cooling for the blades needs to be able to deal with up to 6,080W — or at least a more manageable 4,400W on average.
