Ampere has demonstrated a waterproof computer of which most of its casing is occupied with a cooling system that passively keeps its components within comfortable temperatures.
Designed to be deployed in unconventional places, the 7StarLake TEC300S features a 128-core Arm server processor with eight channels of DDR4 RAM, as well as a fair amount of expansion capacity – and capacity for an Nvidia GPU.
It also features room for four 2.5-inch SSDs, alongside a VGA connector and four USB-3 ports. This is alongside four Ethernet ports – including two 1GbE and two 10GbE ports, according to Serve the Home.
The Arm-powered water-proof PC
The Ampere 7StarLake TEC300S can be fitted with three variations of the high-powered Ampere Altra or Altra Max CPUs, at 64, 96, and 128 cores.
These processors are normally deployed in servers in modern computing environments from on-premise IT infrastructure to public cloud servers. They can also be used in virtual machines (VMs).
The Ampere Altra Max is valued at more than $4,000. Oracle, for example, recently signed a deal with Ampere for it to supply its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) A2 instances with 320-core Ampere One CPUs. These will be used to power general-purpose cloud workloads.
The device itself is also IP65-rated, meaning it enjoys a good level of waterproofing, and its passive cooling system, which makes up most of the unit, means it can be deployed in all kinds of situations including in vehicles like aircraft.
Ampere’s 7StarLake TEC300S can be fitted with up 4TB RAM, with transfer rates of up to 3,200MT/s, while its graphics card is an RTX MXM A1000, which has 2,048 CUDA cores.
While it’s suited to its purpose, it's hardly one of the best graphics cards out there, and the raw performance of this Nvidia GPU is slightly lower than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, according to Notebook Check.
More from TechRadar Pro
- These are the best mobile workstations out there
- Check out the best desktop workstations on the planet right now
- Plucky CPU maker beats AMD and Intel to become first to offer 320 cores per server — with even bigger models in the pipeline
