Silicon diversity transforms AI with flexible solutions

Silicon diversity is redefining the future of artificial intelligence by addressing critical challenges in performance, cost and scalability.

As AI workloads grow increasingly complex, spanning inference, training and multimodal applications, the need for adaptable, open hardware solutions is at an all-time high. This shift prioritizes flexibility and efficiency, allowing enterprises to choose the best tools for their specific needs while driving innovation and resource optimization across industries, according to Steen Graham (pictured, left), chief executive officer of Metrum AI Inc., which is partnering with Dell Technologies Inc. on AI workload innovation.

Metrum AI’s Steen Graham talks silicon diversity with theCUBE.

“I think right now with AI, we’ve really kind of optimized software in a great way,” Graham said. “We’re building this really systematic software with AI workers that will save people material, time and ultimately drive top-line revenue and getting enterprises to really high-fidelity solutions.”

Graham and Manya Rastogi (right), technical marketing engineer at Dell Technologies, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at SC24, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Metrum and Dell work together, as well as how silicon diversity is transforming AI infrastructure by enabling flexible, cost-effective and scalable hardware solutions to meet evolving enterprise demands. (* Disclosure below.)

Optimizing AI workloads through silicon diversity

The benefits of emerging hardware, such as the Dell PowerEdge XE9680 Rack Server with Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator, have placed silicon diversity in AI infrastructure into the limelight. Designed to provide enterprises with unparalleled flexibility, this system supports open-compute modules and integrates networking features to eliminate the need for additional hardware, reducing costs while increasing scalability, according to Rastogi.

“There are a few challenges which exist in the industry today,” she said. “What Gaudi 3 with Intel kind of solves is you don’t have any more like one GPU, you have choices. Second thing, it’s basically an OAM, which is open compute accelerator module, like the cart, the GPU cart. It ultimately builds up to a big board … which are in the XE9680 server. It’s a way out of the proprietary networking and software … all this networking also provides you an opportunity for scale out … in a cost-efficient data center that you can get out of it.”

Central to this innovation is addressing the industry’s demand for choice. By offering alternatives to proprietary GPUs, the PowerEdge XE9680 empowers organizations to avoid hardware lock-in and tailor solutions to their specific workloads, Graham said.

“The one thing about enterprises today, before they deploy AI, they really want to know what the fidelity of it is,” he elaborated. “Both from all the performance metrics we love like throughput and latency, but the quality of the AI. We actually announced our new ‘Know your AI’ platform where we test the AI in development and in production for those domain specific quality metrics, as well as those typical metrics we all love at Supercompute, like latency and throughput.”

Metrum AI is collaborating with Dell Technologies to address key AI and machine learning workloads that drive innovation in real-world applications. Together, they are focusing on critical areas such as inferencing, fine-tuning and distributed fine-tuning to optimize performance across diverse workloads.

“It’s just part of the messaging for Dell with silicon diversity,” Rastogi said. “We want all our customers to have every single choice that they can have with the XE9680 servers. And that’s where this comes in.”

Key use cases include AI agents for customer service, fine-tuning large language models and distributed processing for industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications. Dell showcased the platform’s potential through live demonstrations, such as autonomous AI agents capable of performing complex tasks such as generating service tickets and upselling plans.

“They want to pre-program AI agents to get things done and then they want to loop humans in the loop later for quality assessments as well,” Graham said. “Humans don’t need to be in the loop for every token every second. I think what we’re all hoping for AI to do some work for us, that we don’t have to sit there with it and … co-pilot all the time.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SC24:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE