MiTAC Whitestone 2 5G CU

At OCP Summit 2023 in Prague we saw a generational update to a server that we had seen previously. The MiTAC Whitestone 2 is a 5G CU/DU system that now utilizes the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Of course, the fun part of this system is always the onboard networking. If you want to see the first generation Whitestone, you can see it in the Wild Hardware of OCP Summit 2021 Speed Run that we did.

Let us get to the new version.

Since this is a telco rack focused machine, we can see a few key traits. First, all of the cabling is in the front while the fans are all in the rear of the system. When we did the first generation system, we saw the forest of large capacitors on the right side which have continued to this version.

On the built-in networking side, we can see 12x SFP cages. Four are SFP28 25GbE ports, and eight are SFP+ 10GbE ports.

We can also see the inputs for things like GPS and time in/ out on this machine. The GPS receiver can be either internal or external. This system supports T-8C and T-TGM (IEEE 1588 v2), Sync-E, and up to an 8-hour hold-over option.

On the other side, we can see the 48V DC inputs, along with a second full-height PCIe slot.

In the middle, we get our base management stack with a single USB port. One of the Ethernet ports is for GNSS.

The CPU is the big change and with higher TDP CPUs with Sapphire Rapids, we get a larger cooling solution with a clear plastic airflow guide.

The heatsink has four heat pipes leading to cooling ears. This is a design that we have seen in many recent servers.

Memory is provided via eight DDR5 DIMM slots which means this is a single-socket 1DPC platform, not a 2DPC platform.

The cooling array in the rear has nine sets of dual-fan cooling modules.

This was a really interesting system to see at OCP Summit. OCP has projects dedicated to 5G and Telcos, but there are a lot of vendors and standards vying for business in that space. Still, this is one of the more interesting servers we have seen recently and it was great to see it updated with Sapphire Rapids generation Xeons.

If you want to learn more about the new Sapphire Rapids series, see our 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Leaps Forward piece.