Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: Building a CSP business around SMCI products. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, I'm really just a happy customer.

I feel like the reason why SMCI has done so well in this AI round is because their server architecture is best in class and they have been able to support the internal changes necessary for AI workloads. They also support AMD CPUs, while others only offer Intel.

6 years ago, Cenly Chen / SMCI was saying AI was going to be huge and that total revenue would be $36B, in 2025 [0]. We are well past that number now. Amazing how AI turned out to be even bigger than anyone could have imagined, but at least they had some vision even back then.

Dell, Giga, ZTS are all behind in their offerings while SMCI is iterating and are now even getting to the point of water cooling and L11 manufacturing.

I just received a shipment of AS-8125GS-TNMR2 (8U MI300x) and the thing is an amazingly well designed beast of a chassis. Everything slots together perfectly. If you study the user documentation, the layouts of the internal block diagrams are fantastic and build for speed.

We are lucky enough to have been able to open an account directly with them. It wasn't easy and required a ton of due diligence, but working with the team there has been a top notch experience.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqBuiwkv5I

Gotta love doing a ton of due diligence for the privilege of (checks notes) buying an off-the-shelf product at full price?

Oh, tell me where you can buy TNMR2+MI300x off the shelf! I checked BestBuy and they were out of stock.

My point is that it doesn't sound like they're customizing anything for you. It's ridiculous that you need permission to buy GPU servers. I realize there's a backlog but there are neutral ways to manage that.

Wholesale vs. retail? They probably don’t want to deal with 1000 HNer accounts buying a single chip and do credit checks on them all (or do retail at all).

That's exactly it. Normally they direct you to an OEM partner like Exxact.

To be honest, they are really not set up for individual accounts. It was a bit of back and forth with the paperwork to get everything done, which took a lot of time.

They asked for everything about the business.

As for the direct account, once you have it, it is a golden egg because this way you also have direct support from their teams for anything you need. It is fantastic and I feel lucky to have gotten in.

They do do retail: https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/

Shipped a SYS-531A-IL workstation in less than a week including a weekend as my latest workstation configured with my chosen, albeit from a limited selection of memory, good CPUs and NVME and SATA drives (enterprise options for all of those), all properly kept cool per lm-sensors and smartmontools. I used their live chat to quickly get a couple of answers, it was packed well, and in theory for a reasonable up front cost they'll cross ship a replacement for the next 5 years.

When Mr. Rsync.net was composing his message today I was adjusting my scripts to do their nightly backup to his service that uses their servers.

For a couple of decades have bought a bunch of their motherboards through resellers for myself and family, and built some rack mount systems for a friend bought I forget from where with excellent results. The current swapping of hardware due to the above purchase took down a system that had been in service for a dozen years.

Awesome.

Interesting, I just did a search for 8125GS-TNMR2 on that link, and nothing came up.

They do sell some smaller AI platforms on their store in category https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/solutions/artificial-inte... but seeing as https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/gpu/8u/as-8125... is designed to hold as many as 8 AMD AI cards and has 6 3000W redundant power supplies, plus as you said there's a great deal of ceremony in getting one and AMD knows every customer....

See also its Nvidia equivalent https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/gpu/8u/as-8125... which is implicitly on allocation because TSMC has been contracted to make only so many H100 chips per unit of time, I think I heard 550,000 for 2023. I remember seeing that the Nvidia cards list at around $30K each....

I think the store is more for stuff that's in more plentiful supply and less ITAR restricted, with a limited number of SKUs and options for each that they're prepared to support for a long time.

I worked for a much much smaller customer than yourself several years back.

The store never showed the server boards in stock that we were after. We had to go in via a disty to get anything of value. The impression we got was that nothing was staying in stock very long, and at the time there were enough part shortages that they seemed to be slightly modifying SKU's at a rapid enough rate that it didnt make financial sense to keep the hobbyists happy.

Not surprising back when chip shortages were severe, and while checking out all their workstations I did note one of their oldest SKUs having a CPU option disappear in the process. Some of that might count as clearance but there's reasons to not be on the bleeding edge.

As I'm finding with a Raptor Lake CPU and conservative stock Debian 12 bookworm and it's 6.1 kernel, largest format video playing has some tearing and so on due to driver support based on the error messages I'm seeing, 720p is much better. At the bottom of the stack root ZFS is rock solid: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb...

Today availability should be different and skimming their rackmount SKUs the vast majority claim "Ships Within 3-5 Business Days" which was my experience with a tower workstation.

I went to the above few minutes of effort because the company has done very well for me and mine in the last couple of decades, and people who are buying small quantities which certainly includes small or startup businesses as well as "hobbyists" shouldn't think the old shortages still hold in a period where I hear general demand is down outside of AI platforms. And prices are certainly pretty good.

> It's ridiculous that you need permission to buy GPU servers

guess what, that is exactly what is playing out.. due to certain uniform services closely tied to the show

The equipment was all ordered to our individual spec. Our box is one of the most powerful they've shipped so far. For example, everyone else is getting it without NVMe and we got it with 155TB.

As for permission, look up 88 Fed. Reg. 73458. I (and every other CSP) had to sign multiple documents agreeing to those regulations. Both SMCI and I are taking them very seriously, especially as a CSP renting them out. I'll vet every customer personally.

Neutral or not, from what I understand, there is no backlog for MI300x. You're either on the approved list or not and the entire list is spoken for. AMD knows every single business buying these chips right now, and they are carefully watching the orders ship out.

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