14 DAY TRIAL // Energy efficiency is one feature many companies are really looking for as far as servers are concerned, and that's exactly the reason why SeaMicro has developed and started shipping such a product built entirely around Intel's low-power Atom CPU.
Touted as being the world's most-energy efficient 64-bit x86 server, the new SM10000-64 server is comprised of no less than 256 Intel Atom N570 dual-core processors, combined with SeaMicro's proprietary server architecture.
The result is actually quite impressive, the server featuring 512 1.66 GHz x86 cores in a 10 rack unit-tall (17.5 inches) system, that's not only extremely compact, but also quite energy-efficient, given the fact that the Atom CPUs are quite famous for their low-power requirements.
Plus, the N570 was specifically chosen for this solution due to the fact that it's actually Intel's first low power Atom processor to support virtualization, supports four computing threads and also delivers a very good performance per watt ratio for Internet applications.
Beside the very large number of Intel Atom processors, the new server unit from SeaMicro also comes equipped with no less than 1.024 Terabytes of DDR3 DRAM, which makes the whole assembly even more efficient.
In order to push the server's performance to even higher levels, the SM10000-64 houses up to 64 SATA solid state or hard disk drives, as well as 8 to 64 one gigabit Ethernet uplinks.
It's also important to mention that the new server has been optimized for 64-bit Internet data center environments, while delivering an impressive 1.28 terabit/second bandwidth, which is five times more bandwidth per unit compute than some traditional server systems are able to deliver, according to SeaMicro.
Naturally, such an efficient (both in terms of computing power and power-requirements) server solution doesn't come cheap, the list price for a base configuration being set at a whopping US$148,000.