Intel Announces Atom S1200 SoC For High Density Servers

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.

Great that it supports ECC... but the Atom brand?

[Aphrika]

Quite a few scientific customers will required that, and for performance per watt computing, it's likely that this chip will find its way into those applications.

However, I am amazed that they are using the Atom branding for what is essentially a very different underlying chip. The initial range of Atoms were lacklustre enough that the name seems somewhat tarnished now. Dumping that brand into the server arena may cause some people to have reservations, regardless of how good the underlying technology is.

High density.

[serviscope_minor]

So, it's high density and supports 1000 nodes per rack, or 2000 cores per rack, since it's dual core. At 6W TDP, that's 6kW.

Sounds great, except...

You can cram 64 piledriver cores into 1U, and they have a 140W TDP for the hottest.

So, crunching some numbers (a typical rack is 45U high).

You would need 31 Opteron servers to have as many cores. That gives... uh what? 4400W.

Hmm

So, if you buy cheapie quad socket piledriver machines, you can fit your 2000 cores into a mere 32U, and draw 2/3 of the power. Of course comparing cores discounts the quality of the cores. While AMD is known for a MOAR COAREZZZZZ1!1!!one! approach, the piledriver cores are considerably faster than Atom ones clock for clock. Generally hard to find benchmarks, but the AMD processors usually lie between the i3 and i5 in terms of single threaded performance and the i3 and i5 trounce the Atom.

This is one of the very strange things.

People keep banging on about high density servers, but even the most cursory check from a standard online price quoter almost always shows that not only are the quad Opteron machines denser, they are usually cheaper too. They also have the advantage that they offer a larger unified system image making them more flexible too.

About the only thing that's comparable in terms of price, performance and density seem to be those intel machines where you can cram 4 dual socket machines into 2U. The quad socket Intel boxes are more expensive.

So, what gives?

Can anyone enlighten me?

What's the appeal?