Intel introduced a new low-power, 6-watt processor Tuesday as a possible replacement for the common 40- and 95-watt servers that fill data centers worldwide, and in some cases, poorly utilize large amounts of electricity.

The new lightweight, micro-module servers, as opposed to tower, rack-mount or even blade servers, run cooler and are more compact. Greater numbers can be packed in a rack and several servers can share a cooling fan, instead of each unit needing its own direct airflow.

Intel’s Atom S1200 processor is a two-core system on a chip, with cores running at speeds between 1.56 GHz and 2.0 GHz. In other words, they lag the latest full-power Xeon chips; the current Sandy Bridge Xeon, for example, might run from 3.2- to 3.6-GHz clock speeds. But like Xeon, each Atom core is able to run two threads simultaneously, giving it greater instruction-processing capabilities than single-thread chips.
Network Computing