HPE Cray XD670 vs Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2

Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX H200 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

SpecificationHPE Cray XD670Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2
VendorHPEPenguin Solutions
Part numberAltus XE5318GTSv2
Form factorrackrack
Released2024
Accelerator8x H2008x H200
Aggregate memory1.1 TB
Aggregate bandwidth38.4 TB/s
System power
InterconnectNVIDIA NVLink with NVSwitch across the eight SXM modulesPenguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL

Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.

HPE Cray XD670

A 5U server carrying eight NVIDIA H200 SXM GPUs at 700 W each with 141 GB of HBM3e apiece, driven by a single two-socket node of 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors at up to 400 W, with 32 DDR5 DIMMs across eight channels per socket at up to 5,600 MHz. It is air cooled with a direct liquid cooling option. HPE has taken six first-place results with it in MLPerf Inference v5.1, including computer vision and LLM chat and text generation. Two things this row deliberately does not claim: HPE describes the GPUs only as "8x NVIDIA H200 SXM" and never names the HGX baseboard, though eight H200 SXM at 700 W is precisely the HGX H200 8-GPU configuration, and the compute figures shown are NVIDIA's for that baseboard rather than any HPE claim; and HPE publishes component TDPs but no system power figure, so total power is left blank rather than summing 8 x 700 W and 2 x 400 W, which would count silicon only and understate the machine. Part numbers are also not recorded, since none appears on HPE's page.

Vendor product page

Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2

The Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2 is a 5U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX H200 SXM5 modules of 141 GB each, hosted by AMD EPYC 9005/9004 Series processors with 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL. Penguin's AMD-hosted Hopper workhorse, air cooled in 5U. 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