Mercury Systems, Inc. announced its next-generation rugged edge servers, featuring 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—formerly known as Sapphire Rapids—that will accelerate compute-intensive edge workloads and drive faster insights for critical aerospace and defense missions. Building on decades of heritage in its COTS Rugged Edge Server rackmount family, Mercury's new RES X08 servers support low-latency PCIe 5.0 fabrics, powerhouse NVIDIA H100 GPUs, 400 Gbps network cards, high-speed DDR5 memory, and versatile Compute Express Link (CXL) expansion in an ultra-rugged, highly configurable chassis. Designed from the ground up to dissipate massive thermal loads created by larger and more powerful components, Mercury's innovative and secure design delivers higher computational performance in a smaller footprint optimized for accelerated workloads in military and industrial applications.

Why it Matters: The proliferation of sensors on aerospace and defense platforms has created a tsunami of data that must be processed and exploited in real-time using sensor fusion, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC) technologies to gain a situational awareness advantage. But insights derived are often bottlenecked by outdated computing infrastructure that does not adequately allow data to flow seamlessly between peripheral devices and the CPU. Besides compute and network performance, modern edge servers must also support seamless integration into retrofit platforms, extended lifecycles, manufacturing to high AS9100 quality standards, and validation testing for extreme environmental conditions.

RES X08 delivers significant performance improvements over prior-generation technology: 50% increased CPU core count; 6x greater GPU performance; 50% increased memory bandwidth; 2x faster PCIe throughput; 2x faster optical networking; 1.5x faster NVMe data storage speeds; 2.5x increase in total compute capability per rack unit; 15% improved power efficiency. Mercury is now taking orders for pre-production samples.