Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 4

At the OCP Summit 2025, there was a neat demo that was not widely covered. Intel had an edge AI demo running live. Beyond that demo, we saw the Dell PowerEdge XR8720t based on the Intel Xeon 6 SoC, and other systems including the new Intel E830 double wide NIC with 8x 25GbE ports.

Dell PowerEdge XR8720t

The Dell PowerEdge XR8720t is a neat server since it has room for two nodes in a 2U edge platform. At OCP 2025, this was running a number of demos all using just the CPU, without a GPU or other accelerator installed.

Dell PowerEdge Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 1

The booth was covered in cameras including this one on the Xeon 6 SoC running the demo.

Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 3

These cameras were being used to simulate an environment like a retail location.

Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 2

It turns out, there are entire stacks and vendors that are just running video analytics and other AI inference for those types of deployments. Some of the algorithms utilize VNNI and AMX, but others are still just using AVX2. The Intel Xeon 6 SoC has inference acceleration built-in and also more cores. Unlike previous generations, this one scales to 72 cores. It is not going to handle more throughput than a GPU, as an example, but the point was to show that sometimes “good enough” CPU inference works.

Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 1

Here was one of the Dell PowerEdge XR8720t. This can have two Intel Xeon 6 SoC nodes, and there are many expansion options incuding GPUs if you wanted.

Dell PowerEdge XR8720t With Intel E830 XXVDA8F DSFF Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 1

At OCP 2025, however, Dell equipped the system with the Intel E830-XXVDA8F. That is the dual SFF card that has 8x 25GbE ports per card. With two of those that is sixteen and that does not include the Xeon 6 SoC ports.

Dell PowerEdge XR8720t With Intel E830 XXVDA8F DSFF Intel Edge AI Demo At OCP 2025 2

At some point, if you read STH seeing a system with 24x 25GbE ports that is a server, nto a switch is fun.

UNEEC and Foxconn in the OCP 2025 Booth

A quick honorable mention in the booth was the UNEEC Edge-MHs system.

UNEEC Edge MHS With DSFF Intel E830 XXVDA8F At OCP 2025 1

That one also used the DSFF card slots with the Intel E830-XXVDA8F.

UNEEC Edge MHS With DSFF Intel E830 XXVDA8F At OCP 2025 2

Foxconn also had its Boulder Mesa platform with the Intel Xeon 6 SoC.

Foxconn Boulder Mesa Intel Xeon 6 SoC At OCP 2025 1

Often, these platforms have customers before they are produced, so it is just something interesting to see in the booth.

Final Words

This was just a neat demo because we saw the Intel Xeon 6 SoC systems and the Intel E830 DSFF 8x 25GbE card. As neat as the hardware was, the message was perhaps more profound. We focus on AI running on GPUs and other AI accelerators. We often do not discuss the fact that there are these types of edge video analytics and other applications that have used the CPU for generations. That is one of the reasons that the new Xeon 6 SoC has a built-in media accelerator, which is new in this generation.

Intel Xeon 6 SoC Media Transcode Accelerator

We had this one sitting on our share drive, and we thought we would share it with our STH readers. It is a neat use case, and we always like to see Xeon-D and neat network cards.