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.
Re:Economies of scale (Score:5, Insightful)
>How can lots of slow processors be better than a few fast ones with virtualization on top?
More physical contexts => less context switch overhead => can handle multiple simultaneous sessions more efficiently provided that those sessions are not individually compute or memory intensive.
Thought the title said $1200 (Score:4, Insightful)
My first thought: "$1200 for an underpowered Intel server chip? Sounds about right."
Good old Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh the irony...
Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that.
Damn, but Slashdot is a sad place these days.
Re:Great that it supports ECC... but the Atom bran (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that Intel's Xeon team, and their margins, are 100% totally delighted with this chip, have greatest confidence in its success, and wish it only the best in the future...
This is a preemptive strike against ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
Original poster: "Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that."
This article [anandtech.com] gives some insight into why Intel is doing this. Basically, ARM has been making noises for some time about getting into the server market. Intel is very concerned about this, because ARM is used to lower margins and willing to license their designs widely, and could easily undercut Intel on price. They see the writing on the wall. Sure, they would like to keep ECC and other server-type goodies as premium features, but that's no longer a realistic option. Either they have to offer something cheaper, or customers who want low-cost, high-reliability server hardware will jump ship as soon as they can. This is the market niche the Atom S1200 is designed to fill. Intel gets to tout its advantage of backwards compatibility while being able to dramatically undercut other server-grade hardware on price. With this, ARM is going to have a much harder time convincing data centers to switch.
By the way, if all you care about is ECC, you don't have to buy an expensive CPU from Intel to get that (though you do need a C-series chipset rather than the consumer-grade stuff). Many of Intel's Ivy Bridge Pentium and Core i3 processors now support ECC, though this has not been widely publicized. For example, this i3-3220 [newegg.com] is only $119.99 at Newegg and according to Intel's official site [intel.com] it supports ECC.
Re:ARM comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
>How do they compare to ARM 64 chips?
S1200: Exists
ARM 64: Doesn't exist