Intel has taken its Atom chip architecture designed for mobile devices and re-launched it as a micro-server design for low-power cloud applications. Forty-two micro-servers can fit into a 2U space on a rack that might typically hold two thin “pizza box” servers or six blade servers.
In addition to micro-servers, the Atom C2000 will come in 13 variations that are targeted at use in specific compute, network switch and cold storage systems. Intel, having come late to the low-power market behind the ARM architecture, is trying to make up for lost time. At an event Wednesday in San Francisco, Intel and partners ushered Atom into the spotlight as if to say Intel was no longer just a PC and server chip company.
Diane Bryant, senior VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected Systems Group, unveiled the new chip and said, “As the world becomes more mobile, the pressure to support billions of devices and users is changing the very composition of datacenters.” Many cloud applications, including big data-caching applications using Memcached, require lots of memory but a limited number of compute cycles, making them a target user of the low-power Atom architecture.