Lenovo announced a new ThinkEdge platform at MWC 2023 this week. The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE10 and SE10-I families are designed to use low-power Intel Atom CPUs and fanless enclosures to bring IoT automation to more locations.
Lenovo ThinkEdge SE10 and SE10-I Launched for Low Power Fanless Edge
The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE10 uses a low-power Intel Atom processor.
Inside there are two SODIMMs, and M.2 SSDs for storage. If you saw our Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n IoT review:
Or our Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n-IoT Practical Look
One of the big areas of feedback was that our readers wanted SODIMMs to have upgradeable memory. That is a great upgrade in this generation.
Lenovo also has the same basic platform, just with a lower-power 6W 2-core Elkhart Lake Intel Atom CPU, but for industrial use cases. The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE10-I has operating temperature ranges from -20C to 60C while the standard SE10 is 0C to 50C.
Lenovo’s rationale is that with the same internal platform, just power and cooling optimized for passively cooled installations, that customers can pick whichever one meets their needs.
Lenovo has “Elkhart” as the product name in what it sent us. It is part of the New Intel Atom x6000E and 11th Gen Core IoT Edge Processors that we covered in 2020. These are new 10nm Tremont Atom’s codenamed “Elkhart Lake”. Here is the SKU list since Lenovo did not get us the SKUs being used.
We recently looked at an Intel Celeron J6413 Powered 6x i226 2.5GbE Fanless Firewall that costs under $200 and occupies the top row of the SKU table above.
Lenovo’s solution appears to be a much more robust chassis with more wireless networking options and also features like the ability to configure the devices using cloud activation and orchestration. Even though they may use a similar line of processors, and be passively cooled, Lenovo is building an ecosystem and services around its boxes.
As a quick note, we asked Lenovo before the launch for better photos and specs, but this is what we received.
Final Words
Hopefully, we will get to review these soon. These are always fun boxes to get to look at. STH just looked at a number of Supermicro and even Inspur edge units. It is fun to see how many different platforms vendors are coming out with these days. In many ways, it feels like there is significantly more innovation at the edge than in the typical data center server market.
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