Intel Recently Sampled an Atom-based System-on Chip

Published:2012/1/31 21:43:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

Intel Corp’s newly sampled atom-based system-on chip for servers announces a new low-power system using one of its Xeon processors. The Atom-based chip is a previously announced sub-10W, 64-bit device with a PCI Express interface, supporting ECC memory and Intel’s virtualization and hyperthreading technology. It is like a dual-core part given the hyperthreading support.

Waxman was planning to announce a low-power, highly dense Xeon-based server from SeaMicro, a startup that previously built only Intel Atom-based servers. SeaMicro rolled a new generation of its system ASIC capable of linking over PCI Express to either Atom or Xeon CPUs.

The new 1W ASIC is at the heart of SeaMicro’s new SM10000-XE server that packs up to 64 Intel Xeon E3-1260L processors into a 10U chassis consuming up to 3.5 kW. The startup claims the system uses half the power while offering three times the density of competing systems.

The SeaMicro ASIC links over PCI Express to an Intel hub chip. It uses its own fabric as a cluster interconnect, linking processors in the chassis and providing external Ethernet and storage connections. Each board in the chassis uses four of SeaMicro’s 90nm fabric ASICs, designed in an older process for highest yields. The chips also shut down unneeded blocks in the Intel hub chip, brininging it and the CPU to about 30W down from about 45W.

SeaMicro wants to eliminate the Intel hub chip from its boards to lower power and increase density, something the new Atom chip will enable. The startup also aims to support a mix of Xeon and Atom processors in a chassis, Feldman said.

Feldman was also on hand for the announcement late last year of Applied Micro’s X-Gene, a 64-bit ARM server SoC due to sample late this year and be in production in 2013.

Waxman said Intel continues to estimate that by 2015 about ten percent of the total server market of roughly $50 billion a year could be for what it calls microservers. Such systems are similar to those of SeaMicro in that they use a single processor chip per node, sport low power, a relatively small memory footprint and shared resources such as Ethernet links.

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