HPE Compute XD690 vs Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX B300 8-GPU baseboard, so their accelerator performance is identical rather than merely similar. The choice between them is chassis, cooling, expansion and supplier, not FLOPS.
What actually differs
| Specification | HPE Compute XD690 | Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4 |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | Lenovo |
| Part number | S6G97A | 7DMK |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | 2025 | — |
| Accelerator | 8x B300 | 8x B300 |
| Aggregate memory | 2.1 TB | — |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 64.0 TB/s | — |
| System power | 14.3 kW | — |
| Interconnect | NVLink 5.0 / NVSwitch 4.0 across the HGX B300 baseboard; 8x NVIDIA ConnectX-8 for InfiniBand XDR or Spectrum-X Ethernet scale-out | One NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM baseboard, which Lenovo pairs with fast interconnects between GPUs, CPUs and networking |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
HPE Compute XD690
A 10U air-cooled single-node chassis carrying eight NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra SXM6 GPUs on the HGX B300 baseboard, which HPE names directly in the orderable part S6A37A. Two Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores drive it, either the 6776P or the 6767P, both 64-core at 350 W, with up to 32 DDR5 DIMMs and a minimum system memory of 2,048 GB running at 5,200 MT/s in the two-DIMM-per-channel configuration HPE recommends for performance. Scale-out is eight ConnectX-8 adapters supporting InfiniBand XDR or Spectrum-X Ethernet, with storage of eight E1.S drives and two M.2. Power comes from twelve fixed 3,200 W Titanium supplies in an N+N redundant arrangement, and HPE rates the machine at 14.3 kW continuous and 16.4 kW peak. Air cooling a Blackwell Ultra system of this density is unusual and it shows in the mechanicals: the chassis weighs 226 kg, ships pre-racked by default, and HPE requires a server lift on site before its engineers will service it. HPE describes it as delivering 50 percent higher FP4 performance than the prior Blackwell generation but publishes no FLOPS figure of its own, so the compute shown is NVIDIA's specification for the HGX B300 board rather than an HPE claim.
Vendor product pageLenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4
Lenovo's Blackwell Ultra machine, an 8U server developed in-house around eight NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM GPUs and two Intel Xeon 6700P processors reaching 86 cores at up to 350 W. Notably it is designed for air cooling, where most B300 machines in this catalogue are liquid cooled or need direct-to-chip plumbing, and it carries that with 21 hot-swap fans, six at the front for CPUs and memory and fifteen at the rear for drives and the GPU subsystem. Power is six or eight hot-swap supplies, either 3,200 W AC or 3,800 W high-voltage AC or DC, in N+1 or N+N redundancy. The chassis is 447 by 351 by 924 mm at up to 124.7 kg, the heaviest of Lenovo's 8U accelerator servers. Lenovo publishes no system power draw, no accelerator memory total and no system throughput figure; its per-GPU B300 table matches NVIDIA's own specification for the baseboard, which is linked here.
Vendor product page