- Senao built a complete Intel Xeon server that lives inside your PCIe slot
- 38 Xeon cores and 64 GB of RAM on a single network card
- Dual NVMe SSDs, 64 GB RAM and 200 Gbps – all on one card
The Senao SmartNIC SX906 was one of the more quietly notable exhibits on display at Computex 2026 — a PCIe card that acts less like a network adapter and more like a full-featured server that somehow forgot it needed to fit inside a slot.
The card is built around Intel’s Xeon 6 SoC processor in the Granite Rapids-D architecture and delivers up to 200 Gbps network performance from a dual-slot form factor.
It weighs 1kg, measures 266 x 98.4 x 40.6mm and draws power through a PCIe edge finger and a 16-pin 12VHPWR connector – the same connector that supplies power-hungry graphics cards.
More server than network card
This device comes with three processor configurations, including the Xeon 6523P-B, 6553P-B and the flagship 6563P-B.
The Xeon 6523P-B brings 24 cores running at 2.5 GHz with a 295 W power envelope.
All three SKUs support up to 64GB of 4-channel DDR5-4600 ECC memory, have two M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots and include up to 128GB of eMMC storage.
The core 36 and 38 variants go even further, adding a media transcode accelerator that makes them significantly more capable than the entry-level configuration.
Network connectivity runs through two 100G QSFP28 ports, although the 24-core SKU is limited to 100GbE aggregate throughput, while the two larger variants unlock the full 200GbE.
An ASPEED AST2600 BMC oversees out-of-band management through OpenBMC, with an AST1060 controller handling Intel Platform Firmware Resilience — security infrastructure that belongs in a data center rack, not a PCIe slot.
A card that refuses to stay in its lane
The I/O configuration is where the SX906 stops making conventional sense entirely.
In addition to the expected network interfaces, the SX906 has a MiniDP display output, an RJ45 1GbE management port and a USB3.0 Type-C port.
This Type-C port is functional enough to charge a smartphone on a workbench while the card simultaneously handles network security workloads at 200 Gbps.
A second Type-C console port and two PCIe Gen5 x8 MCIO connectors reveal 24 PCIe Gen5 lanes for further expansion, giving engineers significant room to expand the card beyond its base capacity.
The SX906 runs Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 natively and supports TPM2.0 Secure Boot, completing a security profile that most standalone servers would be proud to claim.
Whether it carves out a clear commercial niche beyond AI edge deployments and specialized network security is still an open question.
What’s harder to argue with, though, is that Senao has packed an entire server’s infrastructure into something that goes into a PCIe bay.
Via ServeTheHome
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