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Marvell's custom AI chip upgrade points to a broader fight over peripherals

Credited to DigiTimes$ · digitimes.com5h ago

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Marvell's higher long-term target for custom AI chip revenue suggests the market for artificial intelligence hardware is widening beyond accelerators, into management chips, storage, memory, and networking. The shift could benefit Taiwanese design firms, but it also raises the…

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Technology · United States

HPE Launches Gen13 ProLiant Servers for HPC and AI Workloads

Credited to HPCwire · hpcwire.com · 20h ago

HPE today unveiled four new ProLiant Gen13 Servers, giving customers AMD EPYC-based compute power for running a variety of agentic AI, high performance analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads in both traditional 19-inch and new 21-inch OCP rack configurations.

Two of the new ProLiant servers–the ProLiant DL585a Gen13 and the ProLiant DL525 Gen13–are standard 19-inch rack designs designed for a range of workloads. The other two new servers–the ProLiant XD245 and XD285–are based on the OCP’s new 21-inch rack design, and are specifically targeted to AI and HPC workloads.

ProLiant DL585a Gen13

HPE’s new ProLiant DL585a Gen13, which will become available in March, is a 10U server based on the standard 19-inch rack configuration that’s designed for emerging AI inference, virtualization, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model fine-tuning, analytics, and agentic AI workloads.

The DL585a is a high-density server that houses two 6th Gen AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 processors, providing up to 256 cores each. It can additionally be outfitted with up to eight double-wide PCIe GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. The DL585a features up to 32 DIMM slots for DDR5 RAM running at 8000MT/s or MRDIMM (Multiplexed Rank Dual Inline Memory Module) memory running at 12800 MT/s.

This server features an integrated 8x QSFP fabric (with an Nvidia switchboard). It relies on Nvidia Bluefield 3 and Bluefield 4 DPUs for north/south traffic and Nvidia ConnectX-8 or CX9 SuperNIC Ethernet cards for east/west traffic. The server features up to six front and two rear PCIe slots providing 16-channel PCIe Gen6 ports, and one more rear port providing OCP 3.0 or four-channel PCI3Gen4. Dual power supplies provide 3.2kW for the system board and there’s room for up to 12 additional 3.2kW power supplies for additional GPUs.

ProLiant DL525 Gen13

The ProLiant DL525 Gen13, which will become available in November, is a slim, 1U server equipped with a single AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 processor with up to 256 processor cores. It can be equipped with up to 4TB of 16-channel DDR memory providing 8000 MT/s or 2TB of MRDIMM memory at 12800MT/s.

The new DL525 sports up to four PCIe Gen6 slots (or 1 OCP 3.0 slot) in the front and another 3 PCIe Gen6 slots (or one 1 OCP 3.0 slot) in the rear. It’s an air-cooled design with dual 60-watt common redundant power supply (CRPS).

HPE says that the DL525’s combination of core density, memory bandwidth, and I/O makes it suitable for AI inference, simulation and modeling, electronic design automation (EDA), virtualization, analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads.

ProLiant XD245 and ProLiant XD285

The new ProLiant XD245 and XD285 are new servers based on Open Compute Project (OCP’s) new 21-inch standard ORV3 racks. The XD245 is a liquid-cooled, 2U server designed to handle four processors, which gives it a 2U-4N rating. Its sibling, the XD285, is an air-cooled 2U server designed for two processors, giving it a 2U_2N in ODP-speak. HPE didn’t specific its availability.

Both the XD245 and XD285 are equipped with next-gen AMD Venice SP7 processors, feature 256 cores per processor and a 600 Watt thermal design power (TDP) envelope. The XD brothers can be equipped with up to 32 DDR5 Registered DIMM (RDIMM), a type of DRAM that runs at 8000MT/s, or 32 slots of the faster MRDIMM providing 12800MT/s. Networking is handled through 2 16-channel PCIe expansion slots per node. It supports 400GB and 800Gb Ethernet, InfiniBand, or Slingshot networks.

HPE says the XD245 and XD285 are designed for HPC workloads, such as running large-scale simulations, including computer-aided engineering (CAE), weather and climate modeling, scientific research, and financial modeling. Both will become available in April.

All of the new ProLiant servers come with iLO 8, the next-generation of HPE’s self-managed encryption capability. This release introduces auto self-encryption drives (Auto-SED) capabilities, which means “encryption stops being a setting someone has to remember and becomes a property of the server,” writes Aaron Lamond, HPE’s product marketing manager, in a blog.

iLO8 also introduces the new multi-party authorization (MPA) capability, which makes high-impact actions, such as key provisioning and secure erase, only possible if two or more people approve it.