48V Was All the "Buzz" at @ Open Compute Summit 2017
Last year at the Open Compute Summit, Google introduced their use and value of 48V within their datacenters. New to OCP, Google's presentation created a lot of curiosity and interest. Now, one year later, there was several presentations on 48V featuring 48V racks, 48V servers, and 48V power components. The number of presentations, discussions, and products shown highlights the very quick embracement of 48V by the OCP community.
Too start, an interesting panel discussion was made by Google, Facebook, and Hyve on the 48V OCP v2 Rack. Several manufactures also demonstrated 48V racks on the trade floor in addition to front end and battery backup systems.
Wiwynn previewed its 48V server platform-M1 which is powered by our Vicor 48V Direct to PoL solution. Wiwynn has identified the growing need for 48V utilization within servers to reduce total cost of ownership and to address the increasing power demands from new CPUs.
Another 48V server board was presented from Google and Rackspace on the Zaius server board/Barreleye Chassis. Vicor was noted as partner to this development for voltage regulators.
On the power component side, Maxim, ST, and Vicor presented their 48V voltage regulator solutions. I had the pleasure of presenting our Vicor presentation:
- Detailing Vicor's 10 year heritage in providing 48V solutions to CPUs
- Comparing the conventional 12V solution to the Vicor 48V solution
- Noting performance aspects including Vicor industry leading efficiency & density
- Our system integration migration to a two chip solution and our Power on Package solution
- Recent designs highlighting Wiwynn's Intel based server, Inventec's IBM P9 based server, and a supercomputer from PEZY all demonstrating Vicor's scalable 48V power architecture addressing all these CPU needs (in addition to memory and auxiliary rails)
Slides and videos of all the OCP Summit 2017 presentations are available from the OCP site: