Lenovo debuts new ThinkEdge edge AI platform

During its annual TechWorld event this month, Lenovo introduced the ThinkEdge SE70, a powerful and flexible artificial intelligence (AI) edge platform for enterprise. The ThinkEdge SE70 is designed to meet the expanding intelligent transformation needs from logistics, transportation and smart cities to retail, healthcare and manufacturing. The new edge solution from Lenovo is created in cooperation with Amazon Web Services (AWS) leveraging AWS Panorama and is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX platform. 

Making the Edge Smarter

Edge AI computing applications are numerous and growing rapidly as businesses intelligently transform operations and services with increasingly powerful analytics and automation capabilities. IDC predicts that by 2023, 70% of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments will include AI solutions for autonomous or edge decision making, supporting organisations’ operational and strategic agendas.

Computer vision (CV) is one of the fasted growing edge AI applications, with security, safety, manufacturing quality control and improving retail experiences among the leading use cases. In a recent IDG survey, 96% of respondents believe CV has the potential to boost revenue, while 97% said the technology will save their organisation time and money.

The ThinkEdge SE70 is purpose-built to unlock the power of CV applications for enterprise. A version of the ThinkEdge SE70 will be offered with AWS Panorama Device SDK pre-installed, allowing enterprise customers to transform every-day IP cameras into ‘smart’ cameras that run CV apps at the edge. AWS Panorama enables tasks to be automated that have traditionally required human inspection to improve visibility into potential issues. For example, AWS Panorama can be used to track assets for optimising operations in facilities and monitoring inventory levels on retail shelves–even in environments with limited internet bandwidth.

The new ThinkEdge AI-capable edge appliance is powered by NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, a production-ready, high-performance, small form factor, power-efficient system on a module that is cloud-managed for enhanced security and ease of training and deploying a variety of AI and machine learning models to the edge. It delivers up to 21 trillion operations/second (TOPS) of accelerated compute, runs modern neural networks in parallel and processes data from multiple high-resolution sensors. Jetson Xavier NX leverages NVIDIA CUDA-X™, a comprehensive AI software stack with highly optimised, domain-specific libraries that reduces complexity and speeds time to market.

The rugged design of the ThinkEdge SE70 combined with powerful processing power and flexible configurations position the solution as critical infrastructure for smart networks supporting real-time decision making in new hybrid business models with advanced automation. 

“AI applications at the edge have enormous potential for the intelligent transformation of business, like using computer vision to track warehousing and logistics operations or automating manufacturing processes,” says Jon Pershke, VP of strategy and emerging business for Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group. “The ThinkEdge portfolio is expanding to include the power, performance and flexibility customers need to build next-level edge networks”.

“We are excited to be working with Lenovo and NVIDIA, two market leaders in edge technology,” says Ankur Mehrotra, director, AWS AI. “This new product brings together strong GPU performance from NVIDIA, hardware system expertise from Lenovo, and scalable computer vision from AWS into a cost-effective and competitive package that customers can use to solve business challenges across many use cases.”

Availability

The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70 will be available in select markets worldwide starting from the first half of 2022. Visit the ThinkEdge web page for more information.