Lenovo advances AI with AMD Instinct MI300X and AMD EPYC

These GPU-rich and thermally efficient solutions are tailored for compute-intensive workloads across various environments and industries. In sectors like financial services and healthcare, where handling massive data sets with high I/O bandwidth is crucial, Lenovo is providing essential IT infrastructure solutions for critical data management. Central to all these offerings is Lenovo TruScale, which offers flexibility, scalability, and support, enabling customers to deploy demanding AI workloads entirely as-a-service. Lenovo Professional Services are also enhancing the AI experience, helping customers navigate the new challenges and opportunities AI presents in today’s business landscape.

“Lenovo is working to accelerate insights from data by delivering new AI solutions for use across industries delivering a significant positive impact on the everyday operations of our customers,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo ISG. “From advancing financial service capabilities, upgrading the retail experience, or improving the efficiency of our cities, our hybrid approach enables businesses with AI-ready and AI-optimised infrastructure, taking AI from concept to reality and empowering businesses to efficiently deploy powerful, scalable and right-sized AI solutions that drive innovation, digitalisation and productivity.”

In partnership with AMD, Lenovo has introduced the ThinkSystem SR685a V3 8GPU server, a high-performance solution engineered to tackle the most compute-intensive AI workloads, including GenAI and Large Language Models (LLM). This server offers rapid acceleration, expansive memory, and extensive I/O bandwidth required to manage vast data sets, crucial for progress in industries such as financial services, healthcare, energy, climate science, and transportation. The ThinkSystem SR685a V3 stands out as an ideal choice for both enterprise private on-premise AI applications and public AI Cloud service providers.

Within the financial services sector, the ThinkSystem SR685a V3 is tailored to enhance fraud detection and prevention, and support Know Your Customer (KYC) initiatives. It is also well-suited for applications that facilitate algorithmic trading strategies, risk management – including real-time transaction monitoring and value-at-risk – credit issuance such as loan analysis and approval processes, as well as wealth management and advisory services. Furthermore, it aids in streamlining and augmenting regulatory compliance and forecasting tasks.

Key features of the new system include:

• Accelerated for intense compute with leading edge 4th Generation AMD EPYC Processors and 8 new AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs
• Fully interconnected with AMD Infinity Fabric, providing 1.5TB of high-bandwidth (HBM3) memory capacity and up to 1TB/s peak aggregate theoretical GPU I/O bandwidth performance and the speed necessary for training and deploying AI models
• With substantial thermal headroom via air-cooling, the Lenovo SR685a V3 can sustain maximum performance of high-power CPUs and GPUs
• Ultimate flexibility including support for NVIDIA’s latest HGXTM (H100/H200/B100) GPUs and drop-in support for the next generation of AMD CPU

“Together with Lenovo, we are accelerating AI transformation for the enterprise in multiple manners – helping guide customers through this monumental shift in computing, while providing robust end-to-end solutions at scale,” said Forrest Norrod, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. “We have a proven track record of bringing amazing solutions, jointly, to the market and are excited to add AMD Instinct MI300X to Lenovo’s portfolio, helping enterprises to rapidly adopt AI.”

Lenovo is enhancing AI inferencing and real-time data analysis at the Edge with its latest offering, the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution, powered by AMD EPYC 8004 processors. This AI-optimised platform delivers AI, compute, and storage performance at the Edge, boasting the highest power efficiency of any Azure Stack HCI Solution. Designed for seamless integration with both on-premises environments and Azure cloud, the ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution provides customers with reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through unique lifecycle management. It enhances the user experience and accelerates the adoption of software innovations.

Lenovo’s ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution, ideal for retail, manufacturing, and healthcare includes key features to:

• Reduce management overhead with automation, near zero-touch provisioning and unique Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) features to deploy faster and manage from anywhere in the Cloud using Azure Arc enabled architecture
• Reduce maintenance time and costs with single point of contact support and centralised, Cloud-based fleet management
• Increase security, reliability, and reduced downtime with continuous testing and automated software updates, validated by Microsoft and Lenovo

“We hear from our customers every day that they need the power of Microsoft Azure to extend into their diverse, real-world environments – from manufacturing floors and retail spaces to fast-food outlets and other distributed locations. Our collaboration with Lenovo allows us to deliver just enough Azure to these critical edge sites while simplifying deployment and life cycle management,” said Douglas Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Azure Edge + Platform. “The ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution gives our shared customers a seamless experience from the Cloud to the Edge, wherever their data lives. This new solution and the power of our adaptive Cloud approach enables businesses to unify teams, streamline operations, and harness the power of Cloud-native and AI technologies so they can focus on transforming their business, rather than managing infrastructure.” 

Lenovo and AMD are introducing a multi-node, high-performance server that excels in thermal efficiency and is optimised to enhance performance per rack for intensive transaction processing. The Lenovo ThinkSystem SD535 V3, a 1S/1U half-width server node, is equipped with a single 4th Gen AMD EPYC processor. This server is engineered to optimise processing power and thermal efficiency, supporting a range of workloads such as Cloud computing, large-scale virtualisation, big data analytics, high-performance computing, and real-time e-commerce transactions, catering to businesses of varying sizes.

Key features include:

• Industry-leading support of CPU technology venders in a 2U 4 node offering – allowing customers full flexibility to optimise workloads based on AMD or Intel architecture in same 2u chassis
• Scale agility allowing configuration of 2, 3 or 4 nodes installed within one chassis
• Simplify large scale automation, orchestration, and deployment with Lenovo XClarity system management software
• Unified power and cooling implementation delivering up to 30% reduction in power consumption vs. Standard 1U rack server

To empower businesses and accelerate success with AI adoption, Lenovo has introduced with immediate availability Lenovo AI Advisory and Professional Services that offer a breadth of services, solutions and platforms designed to help businesses of all sizes navigate the AI landscape, find the right solutions to put AI to work for their organisations quickly, cost-effectively and at scale, bringing AI from concept to reality. The practice can be broken into a five-step process:

AI Discover: Lenovo tailors AI Discover engagements to help customers visualise and map out their strategy and resources for AI adoption. Lenovo’s experts assess the organisation’s AI readiness across security, people, technology, and process – using proven methodology – with recommendations that put customers on a path to AI success.

AI Advisory: Lenovo’s experts recommend the most effective security posture, change management plan, technology architecture, and adoption plan for AI, based on customer strategy and objectives. Lenovo helps define the desired outcomes of AI at any scale, from pocket to Cloud, and co-develops the roadmap to get there.

AI Fast Start: Lenovo’s experts design and build critical AI elements to showcase how those key customer outcomes can be achieved, whether they are business, operational, or technology outcomes. This may take the form of a proof of concept or MVP (minimum viable product) in either Lenovo or customer labs.

AI Deploy and Scale: Lenovo deploys the tools and frameworks to implement a fully secure and scalable AI system or fleet. Customers may choose to deploy via Lenovo TruScale as-a-service, which can further reduce the upfront costs to help deploy GenAI and scale with ease.

AI Managed: Lenovo offers specialised guidance to maintain, manage, and optimise the AI system. Lenovo partners with customers to support IT deployments for their lifetime and continuously cultivates and qualifies an ecosystem of AI Innovators so that AI use cases can grow with AI maturity.

With Lenovo AI Advisory and Professional Services, customers can leverage the support of proven expert teams to mitigate the complexity of AI implementation and see real business outcomes fast. Through a combination of end-to-end services, hardware, and AI applications, Lenovo empowers customers to succeed at every stage of their AI journey.  By simplifying the rollout of AI, we make AI accessible to organisations of all sizes and enabling transformative intelligence across all industries.