Intel prepping Atom bombs to drop on ARM microservers

"it might take an Atom phone"

"it might take an Atom phone and netbook processor wrapped in Xeon drag to repel the onslaught of the ARMed rebels."

It might take a what? How are those Atom phones going?

Meanwhile, for those interested in where the MARKET is going, rather than in the latest Intel press release, go read about several years worth of products based on the "Computer on Module" concept.

Lots of ARM-based product based on lots of ARM chips from lots of ARM licencees, a few PowerPC from a few companies. And for the Windows-dependent (why, in this market?) a handful of Atom ones too.

Now, it's fair to say that CoM cards are not exactly datacentre servers out of the box, but they certainly resemble "a computer on a SIMM" as mentioned in the article. And did I mention that they're mostly not Intel based?

A bit late

"caught the microserver bug back in 2006"

So that means he wasn't paying attention for two years since in 2004 IBM put Blue Gene/L together from a bunch of embedded 440 PowerPC cores running 64 cores and 17 watts per node according to wikipedia. Heck it even piqued my interest back in '05 but hey, welcome to the party.

MicroServers will change the game

Unless you have lived with MicroServers for a while, it is easy to miss the nuances and potential of their power. They are more than just small, powerful boxes. They are a new way at looking at computing. What would you do with a server that handles thousands of users and is the size of a chemistry text book and draws less than a car headlight on high beam? One answer - http://www.billionnodecloud.com

And there are many, many more applications just waiting to be discovered. In its own way, the entire MicroServer phenomenon is actually exciting because it opens up entirely new vistas of computing applications. Want a quiet, energy sipping, multi-node cloud platform on your desk that runs dozens of virtual machines ? http://www.crkit.info

Totally shameless promotion I must admit, but MicroServers will reduce energy consumption in huge ways if allowed to and I would think green techies would be all over that societally advantageous application of MicroServer technology. The electricity cost savings and reduction in coal and gas consumption could be substantial in the aggregate. How many old 1,000 watt servers are there out there sucking up electricity when they could be replaced with 50 Watt boxes that may have more compute power than what they replace? My guess is millions. That means billions of watts are being wasted right now because a lot of the MicroServer technology exists today.

Intel solution

Take an empty Xeon BGA package

Stick in an Atom CPU

Add a 25W power resistor

Badge at as XEON-LTE

Gradually each year increase the resistor thus demonstrating a lower power, reduced TCO, and enhanced green credentials

shoot the proof-reader

"...holding his hands in his head..."

Where AMD can win

They have abandoned ideological ties to x86. They're still committed to what makes money, but they have no embarrassment over punting ARM.

More to the point, they are lower-price players which means they have no cash cow they will try to protect by hobbling the low-end.

Its interesting to see the focus on microservers (rather than phones/tablets) where power consumption is just a little less critical and more oomph might be desirable.

My main concern is that microservers are still not cheap enough. For consumers we need RAID and enough disk-to-network power to saturate a couple of gigabit nics. We need a database for mythtv / amarok.

I'd like to see stuff come out on PCIe cards with SATA ports, external power and NICs - let's keep those costs down!

" stuff .... on PCIe cards with SATA ports, external power and NICs"

"I'd like to see stuff come out on PCIe cards with SATA ports, external power and NICs"

Computer on Module was mentioned earlier but the comment didn't say in detail what interfaces the COMexpress standards (from the PICMG standards people) supports. You've mentioned a list of interfaces you want, but not mentioned a form factor (other than "on a PCIe card"). Do you just need PCIe bus capability, or PCIe size and shape too?

You might want to have a look at a few CoMexpress products.That's express as in PCI express. They're not the usual size of a PCIe card though. Some of them support all your requested interfaces electrically, but depending on your needs may require a bit of adaptation to get the connectors exactly per your requirements. You could see whether the CoM formfactor could be adapted to meet your requirements. You can even get Atom-based CoM cards, if your requirements still need legacy Wintel compatibility.

If COMexpress is way too expensive (and it might be at the moment), there's plenty similar or lighter stuff without the COMexpress seal of approval.

"let's keep those costs down!"

Get the volume up and (ideally) get off legacy Wintel. Today, COMexpress modules are relatively low volume products premium priced for the industrial/commercial market. Like it or not, Raspberry Pi shows what you can get for not much money when the volumes are right and you don't need legacy Wintel.

[minor update acknowledging "on a PCI card"]

micro server is not new

There were the low power MIPS severs (64bit, 6 core, 10w and the features ARM promises to have in their coming chips) back to 2006. So, I don't think the micro server is new concept but just a new name.

The question is if the MIPS server which had everything micro server promise to have (power, program support) was unable to catch the market, why the renamed ARM/ATOM server would be a Success?

The problem is not the hardware

It's the software. One would need something like the "BIOS" on PCs. Something allowing you to boot your operating system without having to build a special kernel. The kernel needs to be able to discover the hardware.

That is the current problem with ARM.