SeaMicro Stuffs 512 Atom Processors into New Server

Posted 06/15/2010 at 5:04am | by Paul Lilly

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You've probably never heard of SeaMicro before, but if the company was looking to make waves in the media, job well done. That's the sort of thing that happens when you manage to cram 512 Intel Atom processors into a 10U rack mount space.

We're talking about the company's new SM10000 server, which comes equipped with said processors slapped onto miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, according to SeaMicro. As company CEO Andrew Feldman describes it, the multitude of Atom chips can be more power-efficient than x86 chips for certain cloud and Web transaction tasks.

"Today's servers are inefficient on small workloads," Feldmen explains. "Atom turns out to be good at ordinary problems and not great at hard problems. The Internet is all about ordinary problems."

Yet there's nothing ordinary about what SeaMicro has done. Each of the 512 Z530 processors run at 1.6GHz and the whole thing needs just one-quarter of the power and space that a traditional "best-in-class" server would need for the same kinds of workloads, Feldman added.

Due for release by the end of the July, the SM10000 will command $139,000.

Image Credit: SeaMicro