It's Happening: Servers with Smartphone Chips

Posted 10/06/2009 at 6:17pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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Any large technology company relies on their server infrastructure to serve their customers. The sort of power that runs Google or Facebook doesn’t come cheap. It's not so much the cost of the hardware, it’s the massive cost of powering that infrastructure that eats into the bank account. Two start-ups aim to change the server game with some new, low-power alternatives to conventional servers.

SeaMicro, from Santa Clara, is putting together servers based on the low power Atom chip seen most often in Netbooks. Those in the know have indicated that SeaMicro will be able to pack 80 Atom chips in a very small chassis. These Atom servers would offer massive reductions in energy costs, but still provide adequate processing power to serve up data. After all, how much power does it really take to push out some Google results?

In Austin, Texas, there’s an even more ambitious server project afoot. Smooth-Stone is working to integrate the ARM chips you’ve seen in smartphones, like the iPhone, into a new server architecture. Smooth-Stone CEO, Barry Evans, accumulated a great body of knowledge working for Intel’s mobile products group. This seems to jive nicely with the company’s apparent goals. Details on this one are scarce, but if the performance is sufficient, the energy savings could be staggering. Could it be that the era of companies running rack after rack of Xeon-based web servers is coming to a close?