OpenMetal Medium v5 vs Medium v4: Key Changes

Q: How does the OpenMetal Medium v5 compare to the Medium v4?

Switching from the Medium v4 to the Medium v5 brings 113% more L3 cache per socket (48 MB vs 22.5 MB on the Xeon Silver 4510), 45% faster memory bandwidth via DDR5-6400, and the Micron 7500 MAX NVMe generation, at the cost of two fewer maximum data bays (4 vs 6).

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The processor upgrade is the headline change. The Xeon 6505P (Granite Rapids, Intel 3 process) replaces the Xeon Silver 4510 (Sapphire Rapids, Intel 7 process). Both sockets deliver 12 cores and 4.1 GHz max turbo; the v5 base clock drops slightly from 2.4 to 2.2 GHz. The performance difference comes from the cache and memory subsystem: 48 MB L3 per socket vs 22.5 MB, and DDR5-6400 bandwidth of approximately 409 GB/s per socket vs approximately 282 GB/s per socket on DDR5-4400. PCIe lane count increases from 64 to 88 per socket, and inter-socket UPI bandwidth increases from 16 GT/s to 24 GT/s.

The NVMe generation advances as well. The Micron 7500 MAX delivers 7,000 MB/s sequential read and 1.1 million random read IOPS, versus 6,800 MB/s and 1 million IOPS on the Micron 7450 MAX in the Medium v4. The 7500 MAX also adds a 6-nines (99.9999%) QoS guarantee for sub-1ms latency at 4KB random read workloads.

The one reduction is maximum drive bays: the Medium v4 supports up to 6 data drives, while the Medium v5 supports up to 4 (25.6 TB). Workloads requiring 25-38 TB of raw local NVMe capacity should evaluate the Medium v4 or a dedicated Storage server.