Wistron Introduces New Concepts and Demonstrates MiHawk Results at OpenPOWER China Summit 2018

By Wistron Corporation

On December 12, when E-commerce companies were promoting their offerings during a key shopping period, a special event which supports industry progress was held in Beijing: OpenPOWER China Summit 2018. Participants, including Wistron, enjoyed the great honor to join such a big event to share their achievements on OpenPOWER in the past year and explore new technologies and solutions from other companies.

As a Gold Level member of OpenPOWER Foundation, Wistron has more than 16 years’ experience on PowerPC development. Utilizing Wistron’s server technology and IBM’s great support, we announced our first P9 OpenPOWER product—MiHawk—at OpenPOWER China Summit 2017, which is 100% designed and manufactured by Wistron.

[caption id=“attachment_6071” align=“aligncenter” width=“343”] Wistron Deputy General Manager: Kang Pao[/caption]

This year, we brought the MiHawk back to Beijing with two brand new concepts: NVMe and Turbo configurations.

For the NVMe configuration, we developed a customized NVMe HBA for U.2 drives. With this adaptor and the advantage of PCIe lanes using the P9 LaGrange processor, MiHawk can install up to twenty-four NVMe U.2 drives and could reach up to 80GB/s on optimal IO bandwidth. For the Turbo configuration, we also made a customized riser card for NVIDIA SXM2 V100, which supports NVLink that has 3X+ speed up from the PCIe version. The riser can also support up to four NVMe U.2 drives. With the customized riser card and the NVMe HBA, Mihawk can install up to two NVIDIA SXM2 V100 and up to sixteen NVMe U.2 drives. 

[caption id=“attachment_6072” align=“aligncenter” width=“413”] Wistron POWER9 server: MiHawk[/caption]

Here is some data obtained from our previous demonstration on MiHawk:

• IBM POWER9 LaGrange CPU has a 30% performance advantage over Intel Xeon Gold series CPU.
• With PCIe Gen4 support, the network throughput has more than a 75% advantage over PCIe Gen3.

[caption id=“attachment_6073” align=“aligncenter” width=“467”] Wistron Technical Manager: Nathan Hsu[/caption]

We are glad that our partner Rambus also came to China to introduce their product—Proteus—at the event this year. Proteus is a customized platform for hybrid memory research, which can provide as low latency as DRAM with much lower cost. Proteus also supports OpenCAPI to perform data transmission, which has more than a 35% bandwidth advantage over PCIe Gen3 per connector.

[caption id=“attachment_6074” align=“aligncenter” width=“510”] Rambus Sr. Director Kenneth Wright[/caption]

We are very proud that our Mihawk is able to help Rambus in their hybrid memory research, just like our beneficial collaborating experience with CS2C, Redflag and Redoop. And Wistron will keep striving to be a leading hardware technology provider in the OpenPOWER ecosystem.

About Wistron

As a long-standing partner with IBM, Wistron utilizes more than 10 years PowerPC design and manufacture experience to offer robust services across diverse technical platforms. Wistron provides tailored, flexible business models from barebones to rack integration delivery to meet various business needs.