Gaudi 2 HL-225 is OAM-only - no PCIe SKU, needs $11,995 chassis + fabric
[blocker] hardware
Fields
id
gotchas/gotcha-gaudi2-oam-only-no-pcie-sku-chassis-requiredClass
hardware
Severity
blocker
Concepts
oamgaudichassisubbsynapseai
Symptom
Used Gaudi 2 modules list at $1,500-2,700 and look like a bargain for 96GB HBM2e, but there is no PCIe SKU and the module cannot power on outside a Gaudi UBB chassis.
Root cause
HL-225 was only ever shipped as an OAM module for the Supermicro 820GH/Wiwynn trays; lighting it up also needs a 24x100GbE fabric. The 8-module baseboard trades at $11,995.
Workaround
Do not buy a bare module for solo/workstation use. The MLPerf figure (8x Gaudi2 = 8,034 tok/s agg on Llama-2-70B FP8) is batch-1024 serving, not single-user decode. The rumoured $700-900 market is stale.