Intel Announces Atom S1200 SoC For High Density Servers 78
MojoKid writes "Intel has been promising it for months, and now the company has officially announced the Intel Atom S1200 SoC. The ultra low power chip is designed for the datacenter and provides a high-density solution designed to lower TCO and improve scalability. The 64-bit, dual-core (four total threads with Hyper-Threading technology) Atom S1200 underpins the third generation of Intel's commercial microservers and feature a mere 6W TDP that allows a density of over 1,000 nodes per rack. The chip also includes ECC and supports Intel Virtualization technology. Intel saw a need for a processor that can handle many simultaneous lightweight workloads, such as dedicated web hosting for sites that individually have minimal requirements, basic L2 switching, and low-end storage needs. Intel did not divulge pricing, but regardless, this device will provide direct competition for AMD's SeaMicro server platform."
Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that.
how much is it? (Score:4, Informative)
one of the reasons no one uses Intel in mobile is the cost.
Re:Economies of scale (Score:5, Informative)
Well, and that's the difference between scale up and scale out in parallel computing. Throughput is typically given by many simple processing units. Latency is typically given by highly specialized processing units.
If it is throughput you care about, simple is the way to go.
Re:how much is it? (Score:4, Informative)
The Intel Atom processor S1200 is shipping today to customers with recommended customer price starting at $54 in quantities of 1,000 units.
Re:how much is it? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great that it supports ECC... but the Atom bran (Score:5, Informative)
They're using the Atom branding because it is an Atom processor underneath. The Atoms and the Core/Xeon/Pentium/Celeron lines have completely different underlying microarchitectures. In particular, the Atom uarch ("Sodaville" in the current generation) has really poor floating-point and SIMD performance, so you can forget about scientific computing on this.
More to the point, the "Atom" brand implies "cheap, low-power device". The same thing "ARM" implies, and as this processor is mainly there to seize control of a niche ARM was trying to grab, it makes sense to use a similar brand name.