Cities of all sizes are looking for ways to deliver next-generation services that improve quality of life, increase efficiency, support sustainability, and prepare for the future — all while making the most of limited resources. That’s why municipal governments all around the world are making strategic investments in technology toward becoming a digital city.
Digital cities use AI to analyze data from thousands of sensors and devices — from traffic signals and cars to video feeds and citizen data points — to make real-time decisions and adjustments that help the city run more smoothly and efficiently. For example:
- Energy-efficient lighting: Smart cities use motion-activated and environmental sensors to increase safety and reduce the energy used by streetlights.
- Smart maintenance: Connected sensors can help city crews optimize maintenance activities such as garbage pickup, street cleaning, and snow removal to reduce costs and traffic impacts.
- Traffic optimization: Using data collected from cameras and road sensors, AI-enabled edge systems can adjust traffic patterns across an entire city in real-time to streamline traffic, optimize public transportation routes, and make roads safer.
These next-gen projects require solutions with real-time processing capabilities and the ability to excel at the network edge, where cramped spaces, extreme temperature shifts, vibration, dust, and other environmental challenges are the norm. A large part of what’s driving the acceleration of digital city capabilities is the availability of compute that’s powerful enough to run AI while being dense, rugged, and simple enough to run anywhere. That’s where Dell PowerEdge XR servers with Intel® technologies come in. They’re built extra rugged for life at the edge and support the latest GPUs for powerful AI performance. In fact, new performance testing shows they’re powerful enough for smart city use cases even when running on CPU only.
The numbers to prove it
Imagine a city where traffic flows seamlessly at all hours of the day and night. To make this vision a reality, cities need systems powerful enough to ingest data from multiple sources and process it in real-time. To give city leaders the confidence to forge ahead with visionary smart traffic initiatives, we recently worked with Scalers AI to test the performance of PowerEdge XR series rugged servers with Intel Xeon® processors and Intel Deep Learning Boost with AMX for AI Inference.
Scalers AI conducted several test scenarios on PowerEdge XR5610 and XR7620 systems for modern AI applications including AI inference, AI inference on video, and Scalers AI video AI applications in a traffic safety use case.
The single-socket PowerEdge XR5610 delivered 2.5X faster system-level performance compared to the previous generation PowerEdge server. We also tested the performance boost of Intel AMX and found it to increase frames per second performance by a factor of 2.15X. Overall, the latest generation PowerEdge XR5610 with 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors delivered significant performance gains across a variety of applications, while the latest generation PowerEdge XR7620 servers, also with 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, further increased those performance gains for the most demanding traffic safety applications.
The testing shows that these servers are ready to help you unlock new, high-value insights at the edge to accelerate critical decisions while saving time and money.
The city of the future starts today
Maintaining and improving the quality of life for the world’s citizens requires solutions designed to help cities thrive as they evolve. PowerEdge XR series servers give you the horsepower you need to start building your city of tomorrow…today.
To learn more, read the performance testing results, see the infographic, or visit Dell.com/edge.
