The Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa is the newest 4-socket system from Dell EMC. With the R940 you can have 4x CPUs and 2x GPUs. With the PowerEdge R940xa one can have 4x CPUs and 4x GPU or 8x FPGAs. Dell EMC is capitalizing on the trend towards offering PCIe-based accelerators for database and other applications. Dell EMC said it is working with Intel FPGAs, which we recently covered, but also companies like Xilinx for their upcoming FPGA platforms.

Beyond the accelerators, the new system is designed to support up to 32x SSDs or hard drives. That gives the platform flexibility and storage capabilities to store data locally instead of having to pull data over the network. For many applications, having local copies of data can improve performance and this system is designed to handle large datasets that dual socket servers cannot handle.

That also means that the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa has the cooling capabilities to handle four high speed/ TDP CPUs, maximum RAM capacity, 32x drives and multiple PCIe accelerators/ networking options.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa Positioning

Like the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940, the R940xa is a quad-socket design. Unlike its sibling, the PowerEdge R940xa is designed for GPU accelerated databases and analytics. By adding twice as many GPUs as the R840 it has the ability to accelerate applications like MAPD which are designed to take advantage of parallel GPU architectures.

If you are looking for less storage and less GPU acceleration, the company is also launching the Dell EMC PowerEdge R840. The Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa focuses on packing RAM, comptue, and storage into a single platform along with GPUs and FPGAs to maximize acceleration.

Like other PowerEdge solutions such as the Dell PowerEdge R740xd we reviewed, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa uses Dell’s OpenManage management suite and iDRAC which means it can be easily integrated into existing Dell infrastructure.