HPE Compute XD690 vs Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC
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 | Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | Penguin Solutions |
| Part number | S6G97A | Relion XE4418GTS-DTC |
| 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 | Penguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width |
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 pagePenguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC
The Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC is a 4U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM6 modules of 288 GB each, hosted by Intel Xeon 6 (6700/6500 Series) processors with 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling puts a full Blackwell Ultra baseboard in 4U, half the height of Penguin's air-cooled B300 machine. Penguin publishes only rack height, host processor, expansion slots and the accelerator for its servers, so no power draw, total memory, interconnect bandwidth or throughput figure is shown here; its full datasheets are hosted off its own domain and were not used as a source.
Vendor product page