AI partnerships featured prominently at Dell Technologies World 2024, held in Las Vegas from May 20-23. Top news from the conference so far included:
- Five new AI-enabled laptops.
- More integrations between NVIDIA and Dell AI Factory, Dell's AI enablement program.
- New partnerships with Hugging Face, Meta and Microsoft.
Dell reveals artificial intelligence capabilities in XPS, Latitude and Inspiron laptops
New Dell PCs are joining the rise of generative AI, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series processor available in five new models:
- XPS 13, arriving later this year with pre-orders starting May 20 in the US. Pricing starts at $1,299. Pre-orders begin on May 21 in the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.
- Inspiron 14which will arrive at the end of this year and whose price will be announced.
- Inspiron 14 Plus It will arrive later this year, and pre-orders will begin on May 20 in the US. Pricing starts at $1,099. Pre-orders begin on May 21 in the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.
- Latitude 5455which will arrive at the end of this year and whose price will be announced.
- Latitude 7455which will arrive at the end of this year and whose price will be announced.
The Qualcomm processor brings 45 TOPS NPUs, which essentially means that 13 billion parameters from large language models like Meta's midsize Llama 2 model could run on the device of these PCs, Dell said.
AI Factory is a Dell-guided environment for AI deployment
In a previous press conference on May 16, Dell senior vice president of product marketing Sam Grocott noted that AI Factory is not a single SKU or product; instead, it is a roadmap of potential products based on the customer's use case.
Dell Professional Services will now include Microsoft Copilot, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Security, and GitHub Copilot. This partnership is part of an effort to make it easier for customers to discover, validate, plan and design generative AI solutions that attach to the tools and workflows teams already use.
Digital assistant services are designed “to help customers deliver turnkey digital assistants wherever it makes sense for their business,” said Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell.
AI Factory with NVIDIA
Dell also separately offers AI Factory With NVIDIA, which uses NVIDIA AI, infrastructure, and a high-speed NVIDIA network fabric. Since first announcing the partnership at NVIDIA GTC in March, Dell has added:
- Accelerator services for augmented generation with recovery.
- Professional services for digital assistants.
- NVIDIA NIM.
- Automated implementation of NVIDIA solutions.
- Dell PowerEdge.
- Dell NativeEdge.
Acceleration services for RAG “enable developers to experiment and explore generative AI in a convenient mobile format for easy demonstration within their organizations,” Chhabra said.
SEE: Humans outperform AI at many tasks, Stanford researchers found in a study AI trends in business.
AI is heading to the limit
Another new manifestation of the Dell/NVIDIA partnership is that NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are coming to Dell PowerEdge servers. Specifically, the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L server will have eight NVIDIA Blackwell 200 GPUs and direct liquid cooling.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise software is shaking hands with Dell NativeEdge, which will be able to automate NVIDIA software directly on Dell's edge orchestration platform.
Availability dates for the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L server and other edge hardware had not been released at the time of writing.
Expanded partnerships with Hugging Face, Meta and Microsoft
Dell and Hugging Face have expanded their partnership with the Dell + Hugging Face Enterprise Hub, a simple path to deploy open source AI models from Hugging Face to Dell infrastructure.
Dell PowerEdge servers designed with Meta AI in mind
With Meta, Dell has optimized select PowerEdge servers for Llama 3. The PowerEdge and adjust the model. .
Azure AI comes to Dell's APEX cloud platform
With Microsoft, Dell is adding on-premises Azure AI capabilities to the Dell APEX Cloud platform with Microsoft Azure, the automated infrastructure for linking public and private clouds. Organizations will be able to use Azure AI with the same APIs they are already used to in Azure; This could make it easier for them to use AI vision, translation, and voice services, among other services.
PowerStore and Dell APEX receive updates
AI was also present in other product portfolios. Other major announcements from Dell Technologies World included PowerStore Prime, a performance boost and a set of new enhancements for the PowerStore all-flash storage platform. PowerStore customers will receive PowerStore Prime through a free software update. PowerStore Prime offers new synchronous replication for files and blocks, improvements to the metro volume feature, and custom, reusable policies for data protection.
Dell APEX received an AI add-on: AIOps. APEX AIOps is an IT operations management tool aimed at increasing observability in on-premises or multi-cloud infrastructure, application observability and incident management through artificial intelligence and machine learning. APEX AIOps comes with a chatbot called AIOps Assistant, which can answer questions about each Dell infrastructure product. Dell APEX AIOps is available on Dell APEX Navigator, a service for block and file storage in the public cloud or persistent storage in Kubernetes.
Release dates for the PowerStore and APEX updates were not available at the time of writing.
TechRepublic covers Dell Technologies World 2024 remotely.
