This week at Dell Technologies Summit 2021, the company launched a new IoT box. This is called the Dell EMC Edge Gateway 5200 and seems to signal a focus by Dell that it needs a larger edge presence. That makes sense given that we are seeing an industry-wide focus on the edge.
Dell EMC Edge Gateway 5200 IoT Box
As a quick bit of context here, this is far from Dell’s first system in this space. The company previously had the Edge Gateway 5100 and 5000 series but those were build for more serial interfaces and around the low-power Intel Atom E3825 and Atom E3827 processors. The new Edge Gateway 5200 is built around the 9th generation Intel Core processors.
Since this is meant for a wide variety of applications, it is designed to be passively cooled in -4 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit environments. Dell also says it will have 5G connectivity options, and it appears as though (given the antenna arrays) that the company will support WiFi and other lower power radios as well. Dell did not hand out full specs of this system and we could not find the specs on its website at the time of this writing even though Dell says it is available.
Final Words
Overall, this looks like a fairly interesting solution from Dell EMC. We recently looked at the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n IoT, M90n IoT, and will have the ThinkEdge SE50 review, which appears to be a competitor to this, online soon. We also looked at the Advantech MIC-730AI we reviewed earlier this year with more of an IoT AI versus connectivity focus. The great thing about the edge is that we are seeing a huge number of different form factors as there will be a large unit volume market for this space with a wide range of applications. That is bound to drive diversity in solutions, so expect a lot of cool hardware hitting this space soon.
That thing makes me want to jack in and do a quickhack for eddies.