Today HPE announced its new server series ahead of Intel’s release of its Granite Rapids-SP or Intel Xeon 6700P processors. Sure, Intel has announced the Xeon 6 family and the Xeon 6700P, as well as the Granite Rapids-AP Xeon 6900P series, but HPE wanted to be ahead of others and announce its new servers before the chips are released. Still, HPE is a big OEM, so any new generation of servers is important.
HPE ProLiant Gen12 Launched Ahead of Intel Granite Rapids-SP
With this launch, HPE has a number of new servers. The first two are single socket servers. HPE told us they are seeing a slow migration towards single CPU server designs as processors get more cores. The first is the 1U HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12. Note we are purposefully dropping “Compute” from the names because that is superfluous naming.
HPE is offering a lot of air or liquid cooled servers in this generation to help with heat.
The next is the HPE ProLiant DL340 Gen12. This is a 2U design that should allow for more expansion and lower power since it can house larger fans. Sadly, HPE is still using the old practice of having standard and high-performance heatsinks and fans. The more modern trend is to just use high-performance components, so hopefully by the next-generation HPE will modernize this design aspect.
For more traditional dual socket servers, there is the HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen12 in the 1U form factor. You will notice here the 144 core designs. That is for the Intel Xeon 6700E series.
The HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen12 is the 2U dual socket Xeon 6 server. Using EDSFF this can fit up to 36 SSDs.
The HPE ProLiant DL380a Gen12 is the GPU compute for the PCIe card accelerators like the NVLink PCIe cards and the NVIDIA L40S.
For tower form factors, we have the HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen12. We last looked at this design in the HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen10 generation, but these are propular outside of the data center.
You may have noticed that these have iLO 7. HPE continues to drive its remote management solution and upgrade that against the backdrop of the industry generally moving to ASPEED chips. Still, HPE has a lot of management tools available that let you do things like see on a map where servers are experiencing an issue, so that is one reason that HPE continues to go the proprietary route here.
Final Words
Perhaps these are technically being released with 144 core CPU support, but the real big one is going to be Granite Rapids-SP. Intel’s 8-channel DDR5 chip has many of the features of its larger Granite Rapids-AP (Xeon 6900P series) but with smaller packaging for those who do not want to move to the 12-channel platforms. Intel said that the Xeon 6700P series was launcing in Q1 2025 so that gives only a few more weeks for the launch. Of course, stay tuned to STH for launch coverage.
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> “Note we are purposefully dropping “Compute” from the names because that is superfluous naming.”.
There’s a reason that they include the word “compute”, it distinguishes what the ProLiant does compared to their other brands. While you might know Cray is supercomputing how many would know: Alletra is storage, Aruba is networking, or even that ProLiant is compute.
Product brands:
HPE Cray Supercomputing
HPE ProLiant Compute
HPE Alletra Storage
HPE Aruba Networking
HPE Ezmeral Software
Thx Rob, I didn’t know any of that, although Cray I could figure out.