Memory Configuration on the OpenMetal XL v5

Q: What memory configuration ships with the OpenMetal XL v5?

The OpenMetal XL v5 ships with 1024 GB of DDR5-6400 ECC memory, populated across 16 of the board’s 32 DIMM slots (8 channels per socket, one DIMM per channel). That 1 TB baseline activates Intel TDX out of the box, and the second DIMM slot per channel leaves a clear path to 2 TB.

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Shipping at 1 TB is intentional, not an upsell or an upgrade gate. Intel TDX requires the 1 TB threshold to activate trust domains on this CPU class; shipping with 16 DIMMs already installed is what makes TDX active by default on the XL v5 without any customer reconfiguration. RAM is expandable, not fixed: filling the second DIMM per channel (all 32 slots with 64 GB RDIMMs) reaches 2 TB, the most common maximum, with a 4 TB ceiling available via 128 GB RDIMMs that are prohibitively expensive and rarely chosen.

DDR5-6400 is the largest performance change versus the XL v4’s DDR5-4800. Per memory channel, that is roughly a 33% bandwidth improvement; across the 8 channels per socket, the aggregate memory bandwidth gain is significant for workloads that were bottlenecked on memory throughput rather than core count. In-memory analytics (Spark, ClickHouse, Trino), large in-memory databases (Redis, KeyDB), graph databases, dense KVM tenancy, and OpenStack Nova hosts running many active VMs all benefit directly from the bandwidth jump.

ECC is on by default and mandatory for production OLTP, dense VM hosting, and any regulated workload where a single-bit memory error must be corrected and logged rather than silently propagated. TME-MK (multi-key memory encryption) is active across all installed DIMMs, providing AES-XTS encryption of memory contents at the hardware level — independent of TDX trust domains. Combined with TDX (active by default at this RAM level) and SGX (also active by default), the XL v5 ships with a layered confidentiality posture on the memory layer that earlier OpenMetal generations did not match out of the box.

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