By far the hottest technology in the data center right now is the AMD EPYC 7002 series. During AMD EPYC 7002 Series Rome Delivers a Knockout article, we showed how AMD now has a product that is superior to mainstream Intel Xeon in terms of compute performance, power efficiency, memory bandwidth, I/O capacity and bandwidth, and cost. Dell EMC is jumping into the fray announcing five new models, new solutions, and enormous performance improvements over their first-generation designs including the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415 we reviewed. What is notable is that Dell is incrementing the second digit to “5” which is positioning these servers as a generation ahead of Intel Xeon in terms of naming convention.
The New Dell EMC PowerEdge AMD EPYC 7002 Models
In the lineup are two new single-socket servers, the 1U Dell EMC PowerEdge R6515 and the 2U PowerEdge R7515. That PowerEdge R7515 we see as the successor to the PowerEdge R7415 but we are told that the company has re-designed the server to take advantage of some of the new AMD EPYC 7002 features.
On the dual-socket side, Dell EMC is again offering a 2U dual-socket design in the PowerEdge 7525. It also adds the Dell EMC PowerEdge R6525 1U dual-socket design.
Performance-wise, Dell was quick to bow to Intel’s marketing standards and did not post competitive benchmarks of the systems head-to-head with Intel Xeon. Intel’s partners know that the company does not like its OEMs to compare. Instead, Dell EMC used the previous generation EPYC 7001 series as a comparison point claiming 280% better TPCx-V results for the PowerEdge R7515. It also claims a dual-socket world record with 62,500 users in SAP SD.
Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 2U4N Server
Dell frankly needed this. We already reviewed the Cisco UCS C4200 2U4N server along with Gigabyte H261-Z60 and Gigabyte H261-Z61. We also had a Supermicro BigTwin EPYC edition in the lab. The Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 is a 2U 4-node server that puts up to eight AMD EPYC 7002 series CPUs in a single 2U form factor. That means we can now see up to 512 cores and 1024 threads per 2U enclosure.
The company is marketing this solution for HPC and data analytics. On the pre-brief call, Ravi Pendekanti, SVP Server Solutions Product Management and Marketing at Dell on the call said that Dell EMC’s VMware Ready Solutions were seeing “5000 VM instances in a 4-node cluster.” If you are looking for consolidation this is a strong figure.
Final Words
One of the really interesting parts of the pre-briefing call is that Dell EMC was pushing real workload performance and enormous performance gains of over 2x. We have not seen 2x and higher generational improvements in servers for over a decade. This is a big deal.
Aside from the HPC and Ready Solutions being available at launch, Dell EMC said that its OpenManage ServiceNow integration, Microsoft integration, and VMware vCenter integration are complete and will be available at launch.
Dell expanding its product lineup for more AMD EPYC means more choice in the market. If you are an organization that is a Dell shop, you now can take advantage of the industry’s best x86 processor technology available today. We have already started reviewing other vendors’ EPYC 7002 solutions, and hope to test Dell’s when they are available.
I was just at a local AMD Epyc event in Serbia, and the presenter opened STH Epyc review online to point out great impressions of the independent reviewer 🙂
STH reviews please!!!! We need them to convince the higher ups we can use EPYC
Too bad the Dell site doesn’t have any details on the new products
@BlinkyTO If you have an account rep, they can quote out and place orders for new EPYC2/15th Gen stuff.
Shame Dell has no plans to offer 7002 series CPU upgrades on their 7001 EPYC servers as of this date. But here they are selling new platforms for Rome instead. And, that’s if you can even get them. Dell is STILL trying to sell us Intel Xeon based servers when we request EPYC servers. HPE is looking better each day, and that’s saying something.
@BinkyTo – Content is starting to pop up.
R6515 – https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-r6515
R7515 – https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-r7515
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-r7515
I am surprised! Hasn’t Dell always been on Intel side? It seems there are quite a lot of demands on AMD EPYC2, I am very worry with the recent report TSMC aren’t filling those orders quick enough.
Ed: I don’t get the dell being intel biased. Let’s be honest there havnt been a market for and since early days of bulldozer. And they still have had products on page for amd all that time.
We are missing blades for AMD but else it’s a full lineup. And that would probably not be possible due to lack of pcie 4 support in the MX chassis