Accelerating key workloads with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® - based platforms

Artificial intelligence (AI), networking, and storage workloads have in common a seemingly insatiable thirst for processor performance. But although the hardware price/ performance curve (Moore’s Law) continues to slake that thirst, it often has resulted in growing energy demands that have thwarted sustainability objectives. Now, though, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors feature built-in accelerators that enable certain workloads to run faster while using less energy. 

Those new processors are enabling Advantech, a leading industrial AI platform and networking solution provider, to deliver energy-efficient server and network appliance solutions that will fulfill high expectations for AI, 5G infrastructure, and edge computing. 

Key applications thrive on performance. 

Operational technology and communications technologies are converging, accelerated by virtualization, and consolidated onto servers for software-defined everything (SDE) environments and intelligent cloud-native infrastructures.

These forces are spurring innovation in AI, 5G radio area networks (RANs), data encryption and security, and high-performance computing (HPC). Market analyst firm IDC says that it has identified more than 150 use cases for edge computing across industries, including manufacturing operations, production asset management, smart grids, omnichannel operations, public safety and emergency response, freight monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems.

“The early goal of edge computing was to reduce the bandwidth costs associated with moving raw data from where it was created to either an enterprise data center or the cloud,” reports Network World. “More recently, the rise of real-time applications that require minimal latency, such as autonomous vehicles and multicamera video analytics, [is] driving the concept forward. The ongoing global deployment of the 5G wireless

standard ties into edge computing because 5G enables faster processing for these cutting-edge, low-latency use cases and applications.”

Market research firm Polaris estimates that the global edge computing market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 38% from $7.43 billion in 2021 through 2030. “The growing demand for the edge computing market is expected to be driven by the rising adoption of smart devices and industrial IoT, increasing expenditure for autonomous vehicles, and growing demand for deployment of a 5G network,” according to the Polaris report.

AI applications in manufacturing, industrial, and enterprise applications are often driven by use cases where video sensors are critical for inference algorithms used in object detection, recognition, and analysis applications.

but come with a higher computational cost to deliver high-resolution video. 5G edge application innovations depend on optimizing the transmission path of packets between the processor and the 5G modem from the hardware platform level to eliminate performance barriers between the 5G carrier network, edge applications, and the Data Plane Development System (DPDK) ecosystem.

Industrial and carrier-grade servers and appliances must be able to maximize performance and ensure virtually zero downtime at the edge, often in harsh environments.

The 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor family provides multiple architecture enhancements to improve performance over the previous generation, including the most built-in accelerators of any CPU on the market to ensure that OEMs and device manufacturers can accelerate performance across the fastest-growing workloads in AI, data analytics, networking, storage, and HPC.

OEMs and device manufacturers can take advantage of numerous technological advances in the new processor family, including:

• Up to 60 high-performance cores 
• Up to 8x DDR5 channels and 80 lanes of PCIe 5.0  
• Built-in accelerators for fast-growing edge AI, network edge, network security, storage, and HPC workloads

“Intel’s new Xeon processors target edge applications, especially across data center environments, that can benefit from enduring availability and industrial-grade features across a wide range of power and performance envelopes,” says Futurum Research. “This includes a vast array of repeatable market-ready solutions that organizations can deploy and scale swiftly.”

Some of the notable accelerators are:

• Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), a built-in accelerator that improves the performance of deep-learning training and inference, which, according to Intel,

is ideal for workloads such as natural-language processing, recommendation systems, and image recognition.

• Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (Intel DSA), which drives high performance for storage, networking, and data-intensive workloads by improving streaming data movement and transformation operations.

• Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel IAA), which improves analytics performance while offloading tasks from CPU cores to accelerate database query throughput and other workloads.
  

• Intel Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel DLB), for providing efficient hardware-based load balancing by dynamically distributing network data across multiple CPU cores as the system load varies.
  

• Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) for vRAN, which increases virtual radio access network (vRAN) density up to 2x over the previous generation, with the same power envelope.
  

• Intel QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT), which accelerates encryption, decryption, and data compression, offloading these tasks from the processor core to help reduce system resource consumption.
  
• Intel Crypto Acceleration, which reduces the penalty of implementing pervasive data encryption and increases the performance of encryption sensitive workloads, such as for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) web servers, 5G infrastructure, and virtual private networks (VPNs)/ firewalls.

Advantech is leveraging Intel’s latest processor technology to deliver server and network appliance products aimed at enabling an intelligent planet and accelerating the goals of industrial intelligence.

4th Gen Intel Xeon processors power Advantech motherboards to enable next-generation machine vision, deep learning, or video analytics applications for the industrial, medical, and IoT markets. Combined with built-in acceleration from Intel Deep Learning Boost (Intel DL Boost) with new Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), the new motherboards provide impressive AI inference performance compared to previous generation solutions.

Advantech servers based on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor help industrial and communications equipment vendors and service providers address increasing AI, networking, and storage workload needs, featuring built-in accelerators to meet performance and sustainability objectives, including the fastest data mobility between compute, storage, and networking layers, thanks to the hardware-enabled Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (Intel DSA).

vRAN opens the telecom edge to innovation, enabling new internet of things (IoT) and cloud partnerships and private network services that will enable operators to monetize 5G investment. Advantech is providing an enhanced range of Xeon-based high-performance servers that have been optimized for vRAN and the telecom edge to meet high availability and carrier-grade network needs.

“One of the key markets for the Advantech SKY server is telecom carrier-edge deployment servers,” says Kevin Lin, senior product manager with Advantech. “With the built-in forward error correction (FEC) function in the new processors, Advantech SKY servers can achieve twice the performance of an addin PCIe FEC card. It also reduces total system power consumption up to 20%.”

Advantech SKY-8134S-11 and SKY- 820V3 servers provide solution vendors, system integrators, and service providers with a powerful tool to optimize the access network while meeting 5G (and beyond) traffic, signal processing, and AI computing needs.

“SKY-8134S-11 also has LAN on motherboard (LOM), which gives customers flexibility to add more.

features and functions tailored to their specific needs,” says Lin. The LOM design follows the Intel reference architecture for 25G Intel Ethernet Network Adapter E810 with high precision timing synchronization, which is very important and essential for 5G-NR TDD network success.

For enterprise networking and security, Advantech network-optimized appliances utilizing 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors improve network security application throughput, leveraging built-in Intel Quick Assist Technology for compression and encryption acceleration:

• The FWA-5072 is a 1U Rackmount Network Appliance for network functions virtualization (NFV) and SD-WAN that offers up to 32 cores for NFV needs with a single 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor and up to 16 DDR5 RDIMM memory to boost computing capability.
• The FWA-6072 is a 2U Rackmount Network Appliance with single 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, support for up to 52 cores, and 16 DDR5 RDIMM, with eight Network Mezzanine Card (NMC) slots for network I/O configuration expansion.
  

• The FWA-6172 is a 2U Rackmount Network Appliance with dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors for gateway and next-generation firewall (NGFW) workloads, available with up to 52 cores per socket and up to 16 DDR5 RDIMM memory. It also provides expandable Ethernet capability via the Advantech Network Mezzanine Card (NMC), with as much as 200GbE of bandwidth per slot.

Leveraging its hardware design expertise, Advantech is providing

motherboards, servers, and network appliances based on 4th Gen Intel

Xeon Scalable processors that accelerate industrial, telecom, and

enterprise workloads while meeting challenging density, efficiency, and

environmental deployment needs at the edge. In addition, Advantech

solutions provide high reliability, including advanced platform management

based on in-house BMC development, long life cycles for embedded

 industrial and telecom customers, global logistics with local support, and

 strong cocreation partnerships for shorter time to market and reduced

 risks.