new microserver chip coming out

[nikimcbee]

For those that are interested.:D
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/09/intel-moves-forward-on-new-avoton-microserver-chips-and-rack-innovations/


Aiming at microservers

While the microserver market (http://gigaom.com/2012/12/06/intel-weve-always-been-serious-about-microservers-no-really/) might not be huge, it is growing (http://gigaom.com/2013/02/06/report-microserver-market-will-keep-rising-who-will-be-the-market-leaders/). And Intel needs to play in it, as competition from chip makers using ARM architectures grows.
That’s why Intel is following through with plans to start making power-sipping 22-nanometer Avoton system on chips (http://gigaom.com/2009/02/05/intel-follows-the-crowd-with-integrated-chips/) (SoCs) with billions of transistors in the second half of this year. The “wimpy-core” Avoton chips built with the new Silvermont microarchitecture, announced (http://gigaom.com/2012/06/20/cores-in-the-cloud-does-brawny-or-wimpy-win/) in June at GigaOM’s Structure 2012 conference in San Francisco, target webscale data center deployments. They will be available for use in Hewlett-Packard’s new Project Moonshot (http://gigaom.com/2013/04/08/serious-question-is-it-too-late-for-hp-project-moonshot-to-disrupt-anything/) servers.


http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/04/intel_avoton-100032217-medium.jpg

(girl not included)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033403/intel-atom-chips-poised-for-power-performance-boost-with-avoton.html


Avoton chips will also get power and performance benefits by virtue of being made using the 22-nanometer process. Chips manufactured using this process have transistors stacked on top of each other, which is a change from traditional design in which transistors are placed next to each other. The 3D design, called FinFET by the semiconductor industry, allows chip makers to pack more transistors in a smaller space, which results in power and performance boosts.
Avoton will succeed Atom server chips code-named Centerton, which shipped in December and were made using the old 32-nanometer process. Centerton failed to find much adoption, but will be in Hewlett-Packard’s new dense server — developed as part of a project called Project Moonshot — that will be announced on Monday. HP will likely move its server over to Avoton chips once they become commercially available.

[the_tyrant]

I wanted to post this a long time ago, but I really can't make up my mind on what to say. I really want to hear what you have to say about it.


Personally, I believe that ARM in servers is too much hype, not enough actual potential. My reasons are as following.


First of all, lets consider what ARM chips have an advantage in. ARM CPUs have really low power consumption, but with the low power consumption, their performance isn't really good. The best ARM chips out there right now, are barely capable of defeating the lowest rung x86 processors.

Now with servers, the main thing that should be considered should be performance per watt, not just raw performance or power consumption. There are little actual numbers (since cross platform benchmarks are practically non-existent), but I believe that x86 or Power processers are better in performance/watt. ARM is capable of delivering an extremely low power consumption (although x86 is just as good if not better with Intel's new Atom platform), but their performance is generally poor compared to their x86 counterparts.

Also, the whole "smaller servers" thing is disappearing. With the excellent VMware and HyperV virtualization platforms. The whole small server sector is probably not going to take off. After all, Atom servers aren't really popular are they? If they aren't really popular, why should be believe that ARM will make the sector take off? Why would a small dedicated server be used where a virtual machine can be used instead?

Finally, the software support simply isn't there. Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (arguably the 2 most popular choices) don't support ARM. Many other pieces of commonly used server software like Microsoft SQL Server don't support the ARM platform either.


I believe the window on when ARM can gain success in the server market is closing fast. Virtualization, cloud instances, and low power consumption x86 will eat ARM's lunch in the server space.