Who needs one big CPU when you could have dozens of little ones?
COMPUTEX 2026 Gigabyte showed off a high density server platform at Computex this week that crams 40 low-power compute nodes into a pizza box.Amid a sea of nearly identical MGX and NVL blades, the R1C7-KOA-AS1 was one of the more unusual systems on this year’s show floor. Rather than using Intel or AMD's datacenter class Xeon or Epyc, the machine is powered by dozens of notebook processors.Specifically, Gigabyte has opted for Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V. Launched in mid 2024, each chip is equipped with four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores clocked at up to 4.8 GHz and 3.7 GHz respectively.
Each processor is paired with 32 GB of LPDDR5x 8,533 MT/s memory, Arc 140V graphics with eight Xe cores, and a 48 TOPS NPU.
These chips are mounted on a thin motherboard roughly the size of an index card. Each node is equipped with a pair of PCIe 5.0 m.2 drives, which probably provide redundant storage.
Here's a look at the index card sized compute nodes that make up Gigabyte's R1C7-KOA-AS1. Each packs 8-core Intel Lunar Lake mobile processor with 32 GB of memory and a pair of m.2 SSDs.
