Data Center Power Relief from Atom-based Servers

Designed to be more power efficient while still delivering equal performance as 40 1U dual-socket quad-core Intel Xeon servers, SeaMicro’s newly released SM10000 may seem like the ideal piece of hardware. The SM10000 consists of 512 low-power 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors, some proprietary ASICs chipsets and FPGAs and memory, unfortunately this supercomputer-like server was, “designed primarily for ‘Internet’ workloads,” workloads that are, “highly partitioned and independent and can be executed quickly in a single pipeline,” said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro’s CEO. He went on to say, “Just try running Oracle in 2 GB of memory; it’s not going to happen. As much as I’d like to, I can’t just replace my entire data center with these things.” Feldman has discussed expanding the available memory to 4 GB with SeaMicro, which as he said, “would dramatically extend SM10000’s usefulness.”