Server Update April 2013: Positioning the HP Moonshot 1500
by Johan De Gelas on April 11, 2013 8:11 AM EST- Posted in
- Enterprise CPUs
- Arm
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Calxeda
- S1200
Intel's Next Generation Low Power Server CPUs
As I was writing this, Intel revealed details of new low-power SoCs for the data center, all coming in 2013.
The Intel Atom™ Processor S12x9 product family for Storage. The Atom s12x9 will get up to 40 lanes of integrated PCIe 2.0 and hardware RAID storage acceleration. With Asynchronous DRAM Self-Refresh (ADR), the Intel Atom S12x9 family can protect critical DRAM data in the event of a power interruption. This is probably the Atom S1200 that will be hard to beat in its intended market.
The Intel Avoton is most likely the first Atom that makes sense for the server market. Built on Intel’s 22nm process technology, using cores based upon the brand new Atom micro architecture "Silvermont," and integrating an Ethernet controller, this Atom holds a lot of promise. Intel announced that Avoton is now being sampled to customers and the first systems are expected to be available in the second half of 2013. With Avoton, the HP's Moonshot performance per watt ratio will improve significantly.
But even with a new architecture and better integration, the Atom will be facing stiff competition from ARM A15 & A57 based server cores, and even from the newest Intel Xeon processor E3 1200 v3. Intel announced that the low power versions of the Haswell based Xeon will have a TDP as low as 13 Watts. This chip will further blur the line between the "micro server CPUs" and "general purpose CPUs" even further. There is no telling which CPU will be the performance/watt king even in server workloads with relatively low computational demand.
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pixelstuff - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
The acronyms were quite prolific in this article.WeaselITB - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
IDK, TLAs R AOK w/me.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
AFAIk, LZMA uses only two threads...LZMA2 can use as many as required. Can you do another benchmark, this time with LZMA2 algo, and set the number of threads to something big.
mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
Nevermind, i thought you were testing on the complete thing, not only one node.JohanAnandtech - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
The benchmark actually spawns 4 threads if you instruct it to do that.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
Those 4 threads would be 4 processes, right ? Or a single process with 4 threads ?Kevin G - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
Any news of Intel's ISCCC coming to market? Even if performance is the same, it further integrates the various nodes further for greater density and the possibility of lower performance.Gigaplex - Thursday, April 11, 2013 - link
I wonder how AMDs Bobcat would compare in this scenario.Spunjji - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link
Probably average, not great at anything though as its PPW is probably lower than ARM in this scenario. That's mostly due to outdated process tech, though, so Jaguar might well be a nice competitor; even more so if people can figure out novel ways to use the GPU.fteoath64 - Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - link
The Atom is between a rock-and-a-hard-place. It is only good for consumer NAS devices and nothing really else. The Bobcat cores are worse in power consumption while 25% SLOWER than the Atom , so it is pretty useless, although its gpu is rather respectable at 80 cores. The low power Xeon Haswell is rather nice and should be developed (or sliced and diced) into the "New" Atom2 architecture, saving Intel the dearth of the Atom brand that has long since been dead and beaten over and over. There is no shame for Intel on this "dead horse". they kept beating it for all to see!.