HPE ProLiant Gen11 Kicks-off Again with AMD EPYC Genoa

HPE today announced its next-generation of servers. This is part of a really strange industry trend where companies rush to announce servers before the chips are out and their systems are ready to order. Still, HPE is disclosing major new specs on the AMD EPYC Genoa line as part of the announcement, as well as reiterating its Ampere Arm solution.

HPE ProLiant Gen11 Kicks-off Again with AMD EPYC Genoa

Here is the lineup of the new HPE ProLiant Gen11. We will note that Lenovo has already launched its Intel Sapphire Rapids, AMD EPYC Genoa, and Chinese Arm Servers. HPE is, however, providing more details.

The HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen11 is the update to the HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 we reviewed (also see an important change.) HPE is supporting PCIe Gen5, and a full 24 DIMM slots. Of note here, HPE is not shipping a maximum capacity of 3TB at launch. Instead, that will be in 2023.

Editor’s note: We are under embargo, but we will say this is not a HPE issue, this is an AMD Genoa challenge at launch.

Something interesting about the DL325 Gen10’s. We have a cluster of 5 of these in one of the labs, all with EPYC 7002 “Rome” generation (EPYC 7402P) CPUs. We also have a DL385 Gen10, and two DL360 Gen10’s in the same cluster. Of those eight machines, only two of the DL325 Gen10’s have not had a hardware failure in three years. The cluster will be fully decommissioned this quarter due to the failures on other nodes.

The HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 is an update to the Gen10. We have a Gen10 that you may see a review of soon. We were going to use these as hosting nodes for STH, but unfortunately, the DL345 Gen10 did not pass our production validation. Still this is a single socket system, but one in a 2U chassis allowing for more storage and expansion.

The HPE ProLiant DL365 Gen11 is a dual-socket server. Here we will get up to 96 cores per socket and 192 cores/ 384 threads per server. Once we show our review of Genoa, it will be clear why fitting two 96 core processors into 1U is a feat of engineering.

The 2U form factor is the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11. We are likely going to suggest many of our reader focus on 2U for next-gen air-cooled servers, so we expect this and the DL345 Gen11 to be popular.

While the Genoa servers are new, the Ampere Altra Max Gen11 variant is not.

HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11

HPE previously launched the ProLiant Gen11 months ago with the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 Ampere Altra Max Arm Servers Launched.

HPE’s availability in this situation is very rough. We have requested a review unit for several months. HPE has been unable to get us one. Instead, we did the Gigabyte Ampere Altra Max and NVIDIA A100 piece. In the next week, you will see a Supermicro Ampere Altra Max system reviewed, and we will have yet another one with NVIDIA GPUs from Supermicro this month as well. We are unsure as to why other companies are able to get us review units within a few days and HPE is unable to, but we understand HPE is having supply chain challenges.

Final Words

HPE is launching a new line of AMD EPYC Genoa servers. That is exciting, but also expected. AMD has a very good part this generation. Intel Sapphire Rapids will be a few months behind. We will also note that HPE is launching this quarter, but it is launching a full feature set in these systems in 1H 2023.

Still, we cannot wait to show you AMD EPYC Genoa numbers next week as well as some of the systems we have been testing!