Server Hardware Basics: Servers, CPUs, Memory, Disk, and Network Cards

Server

Based on form factor and usage, servers are classified into tower, rack, blade, and high‑density servers, each with typical deployment scenarios.

Motherboard Architecture

The chassis is just a shell; the core is the motherboard. A typical Intel C600 chipset connects multiple CPUs via QPI, memory slots, PCIe slots, and low‑speed peripherals.

Server Selection Considerations

Constraints: operating system, customer preferences, budget, programming language.

Deployment scale: large deployments may require blade or high‑density servers.

Scalability: number of memory slots, disks, PCIe slots.

Stability: OS hierarchy (UNIX > Linux > Windows) and hardware hierarchy (mainframe > x86).

Physical, virtual, and container deployment models with compute and I/O characteristics.

Server Vendors

Domestic: Sugon, Huawei, Inspur, H3C, Lenovo, Great Wall.

International: Dell, HP, IBM.

CPU

Key concepts include socket, core, hyper‑threading, frequency, memory channels, and supported memory specifications. Use lscpu to view CPU details.

Example: a 2‑socket server with 18 cores each and hyper‑threading shows 72 logical CPUs (2 × 18 × 2).

CPU Vendors

International: Intel, AMD.

Domestic: Loongson, Zhaoxin, Phytium, HaiGuang, ShenWei, Huawei.

Mainstream CPU Product Overview

Intel

Intel Xeon Scalable series with Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers.

AMD

AMD EPYC series (referred to as “Xiao Long”) with high core counts; a table of models and specifications is provided.

Huawei Kunpeng

Kunpeng 916 (low‑power), 920‑3326/4826 (performance‑focused) and 920‑3326/4826 (high‑performance) with core counts, frequencies, TDP, PCIe version, and memory channel details.

CPU Performance Comparison

Graph shows domestic CPUs achieving roughly half the performance of mid‑range Intel CPUs.

NUMA

Non‑Uniform Memory Access: each CPU has local memory channels; remote memory access incurs additional latency (about three times slower). Use numactl -s to view NUMA topology and numactl --cpunodebind=0 --membind=0 command to bind a process to a specific node.

Memory

Key aspects: specifications (DDR3/DDR4), size, frequency, bandwidth (~30 GB/s for DDR4‑2400), and channels (e.g., 4‑channel provides four‑fold bandwidth). Commands: dmidecode -t memory | more , dmidecode -t memory | grep Size , and free to view capacity and availability.

Disk

Performance measured by throughput (MB/s) and IOPS. Typical values: HDD 100‑200 MB/s, SATA SSD 200‑500 MB/s, PCIe SSD 900 MB/s‑3 GB/s; IOPS: HDD 100‑200, SATA SSD 30k‑50k, PCIe SSD hundreds of thousands.

Network Card

Network Interface Card (NIC) provides connectivity; speed specifications (100 M, 1 G, 10 G, 25 G), interface types (RJ45, fiber), and bonding modes (broadcast, round‑robin, active‑backup, load‑balance, LACP) for increased throughput and high availability.

Conclusion

The article introduces fundamental server hardware knowledge, enabling informed hardware selection based on component characteristics.