Most of the time, the enterprise server market strikes at glacial velocity with modifications occurring so incrementally that they’re barely seen to the bare eye. But sometimes a technological development or a market rebalancing sparks a large shift that causes folks to rethink long-held assumptions. This dynamic is very obvious in x86-based techniques, the place Intel’s market dominance has been so overwhelming that efficient challenges seldom come up.
But “seldom” doesn’t means “never,” even for Intel with AMD being its most legit challenger. Under the management of CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su, the corporate has revitalized its knowledge heart ambitions and efforts by way of its EPYC chips, which have been adopted by quite a few system distributors, together with Lenovo. The new Lenovo two-socket ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 options introduced this week illustrate how the corporate, with AMD’s help, is making the server market extra dynamic, fascinating and unpredictable than it has been for a while.
EPYC selections, Lenovo-style
So, what’s the story with these latest EPYC-based Lenovo options? At one degree, the two-socket ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 actually double up on the preliminary AMD-powered servers the corporate launched final August, the one socket ThinkSystem SR635 (1U) and SR655 (2U).
Those options each integrated one EPYC 7002 64-core processor and as much as 2TB of reminiscence, together with assist for storage (3.5 inch, 2.5 inch and NVMe drives) and optionally available GPUs in accord with their measurement. While the SR635 was tuned for virtualized and hybrid workloads, the SR655 was optimized for storage-rich options, like VDI (digital desktop infrastructures) and SDS (software-defined storage).
If these preliminary ThinkSystem options have been designed for flexibility, it’s correct to say that the brand new two-socket techniques are constructed for efficiency. Along with incorporating two second gen EPYC 7002 processors (for a mixed 128 cores per system), the SR645 and SR665 assist subsequent gen PCIe four which doubles I/O bandwidth. The new techniques additionally supply elevated GPU assist (as much as eight 75W NVDIA T4s graphics playing cards).
As a results of these vital efficiency enhancements, the ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 could be configured to assist sooner transaction processing, better grid computing capability, muscular high-performance computing tasks and extremely environment friendly video analytics and synthetic intelligence (AI) workloads.
The new techniques’ enhanced capabilities additionally ship vital enterprise worth. For instance, Lenovo famous that the PCIe Gen4 options can ship twice the bandwidth and sooner reminiscence velocity improve efficiency by 45%, making the brand new techniques wonderful options for extremely virtualized environments and different demanding workloads.
Additionally, prospects excited by transaction and enterprise software efficiency ought to notice that the brand new ThinkSystem options have set a brand new world document within the SAP SD-Tier 2 benchmark. Finally, Lenovo studies that the brand new options are among the many market’s most energy environment friendly two-socket techniques, delivering decrease system TCO which, in…
