Rack scale is on the rise, but it's not for everyone... yet

Analysis With all the hype around Nvidia's NVL72, AMD's newly announced Helios, and Intel's upcoming Jaguar Shores rack systems, you'd be forgiven for thinking the days of eight-way HGX servers are numbered.

Spoiler alert: they're probably not going anywhere anytime soon, the EVP of AMD's datacenter solutions group told press at the House of Zen's Advancing AI event last week. 

It doesn't help that these rack-scale architectures are big, complex, and power-hungry – not to mention expensive. It's estimated Nvidia's GB200 NVL72s are selling for nearly $3.5 million a pop. Even if AMD manages to undercut its much larger rival, that's a lot for any enterprise to swallow at a time when most C-suites are still struggling to find an application for AI that'll actually pay for itself. 

Then again, AMD's 72-GPU Helios reference design — check out ...