The Inspur NF5488M5 is something truly unique. Although many vendors, including Inspur, can claim to have an 8x NVIDIA Tesla V100 system, the NF5488M5 may just be the highest-end 8x Tesla V100 system you can buy. Not only is it using 8x Tesla V100 SXM3 and for “Volta Next” GPUs with 350W+ TDPs, but it has something special on the fabric side. The GPUs are connected together using NVSwitch technology which means each GPU has 300GB/s of NVLink bandwidth to each of the other GPUs. Essentially, this is half of an NVIDIA DGX-2 or HGX-2 in a 4U chassis.

In our review, we are going to focus a bit more time than normal talking about the hardware, and what makes it completely different than other offerings on the market. By April 2019, Inspur was able to claim at least 51% of AI server market share in China, and this is one of the innovative designs that is helping Inspur continue to build market share. Just for a bit of context, we borrowed this server but the power costs alone to do this review were several thousand dollars so it was a big investment for STH to make to review this server. As such, we want to ensure that we are showing why we wanted to bring this to our readers.