THE CRUNCH
HPE has announced the first four of its ProLiant Gen13 servers, all built around 6th Generation AMD EPYC processors. The lineup spans a high-density GPU platform, a compact single-socket system and two OCP-compliant rack machines, aimed at workloads including AI inference, analytics, virtualisation, simulation and modelling.
The HPE ProLiant DL585a Gen13 is the flagship of the batch: a dual-socket platform supporting up to eight double-wide PCIe GPUs and PCIe Gen 6 connectivity, pitched at AI inference, retrieval-augmented generation fine-tuning and virtualisation. The DL525 Gen13 takes the opposite approach, a 1U single-socket system with one EPYC chip of up to 256 cores, 16-channel memory supporting DDR5 and MRDIMM, and PCIe Gen 6, aimed at high-throughput jobs such as fraud detection and market-data processing.
For rack-scale compute, the OCP-compliant XD245 packs up to eight EPYC processors into a one-Open-Rack-Unit, four-node direct liquid-cooled design, while the air-cooled XD285 uses two Open Rack Units for two nodes. Both target CPU-intensive work such as computational modelling, weather and climate simulation and financial modelling.
Security features get top billing too, with HPE iLO 8 bringing automatic protection and what the company calls post-quantum readiness, managed through HPE Compute Ops Management. HPE says more Gen13 systems for mainstream enterprise, edge and AI workloads will follow beyond these first four.