Hot on the heels of the Monday launch of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s new, third-generation “Milan” EPYC 7003 processors for data center servers, Dell Technologies Inc. today announced a refreshed line of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers based on those new chips.

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers will enable adaptive compute capabilities in a broad range of data center workloads, Dell said.

The company’s new flagship data center hardware offering is the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 server, which is powered by two of AMD’s new EPYC processors and four of Nvidia Corp.’s A100 graphics processing units. The combination helps simplify artificial intelligence infrastructure and is designed to tackle some of the most intensive, accelerated workloads in machine learning, high-performance computing and GPU virtualization.

The new AMD Epyc 7003 series “Milan” chips are said to be a big deal. They’re based on a seven-nanometer chip process architecture that enables much faster processing. They incorporate a number of new security isolation technologies. including “shadow stack,” which is a silicon-level mechanism that helps to block attacks that use the control-flow hijacking technique.

Ravi Pendekanti (pictured), senior vice president of server and networking portfolio management at Dell, said in a blog post that some of the PowerEdge XE8545’s key capabilities are its highly optimized CPU-to-GPU performance and the improved input/output throughput it provides.

“This is one of the first servers to have the new Nvidia NVLink baseboard with the incredibly fast A100 chips in it,” Pendekanti said. “For example, you can boost A100 machine learning inferencing with 1.46X more images per second per GPU within the PowerEdge XE8545.1.”

The accelerated I/O throughput, meanwhile, help prevent performance bottlenecks when executing large data sets, the executive said.

Another plus is the PowerEdge XE8545’s ease of deployment. Pendekanti explained that AI infrastructure has a reputation for being difficult to deploy and manage, so the company has worked to remedy those problems with new design and management features that simplify those tasks.

“The PowerEdge XE8545 is a 4U, standard-depth rack server, so it fits effortlessly into your existing data center,” Pendekanti said. “It is completely air-cooled for greater efficiency and lower cost of operation. This avoids the hassle of incorporating extra piping to accommodate liquid cooling.”

On the management side, the PowerEdge XE8545 provides support for OpenManage Enterprise, which means it’s possible to implement, monitor and maintain the servers using Dell’s OpenManage integrations.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE that he was pleased to see Dell leaning so hard on AMD’s new chips with its refreshed PowerEdge servers. “End customers want more cloud-like experiences and I think they will appreciate Dell’s new management capabilities especially,” he said.

“Dell Technologies is focused on helping businesses tackle increasingly complex and demanding workloads,” Pendekanti said. “Through our close collaboration with AMD, we are addressing these demands by charting the path toward fully autonomous infrastructure with advanced PowerEdge servers that deliver newfound efficiency, embrace AI and address the demands for IT at the edge.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Dell was one of a number of server providers that are rushing to take advantage of AMD’s latest computing platform.

“Dell is bringing ‘Milan’ to its PowerEdge servers, and not surprisingly it is focusing on compute-intensive AI and machine learning workloads,” Mueller said. “This will write another chapter in the high performance computing history books.”

Dell said its refreshed PowerEdge servers, including the PowerEdge XE8545, will start rolling out “soon this year.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE