Theres some interesting future possibilities for the SeaMicro machines. First, SeaMicro could extend that torus interconnect to span multiple chassis. Second, it could put a “Patsburg” C600 chipset on an auxiliary card and actually make fatter SMP nodes out of single processor cards and then link them into the torus interconnect. Finally, it could of course add other processors to the boards, such as Tileras 64-bit Tile Gx3000s or 64-bit ARM processors when they become available.
via SeaMicro adds Xeons to Atom smasher microservers • The Register.
Timothy Prickett Morgan writing for The Register, has a great article on SeaMicro’s recent announcement of a Xeon-based 10U server chassis. Seemingly going against it’s first two generations of low power massively parallel server boxes, this one uses a brawny Intel Xeon server chip (albeit one that is fairly low power and low Thermal Design Point).
Sad as it may seem to me, the popularity of the low power, massively parallel cpu box must not be very lucrative. But a true testament to the flexibility of their original 10U server rack design is the ability to do a ‘swap’ of the higher power Intel Xeon cpus. I doubt there’s too many competitors in this section of the market that could ‘turn on a dime’ the way SeaMicro has appeared to do with this Xeon based server. Most often designs will be so heavily optimized for a particular cpu, power supply and form factor layout that changing one component might force a bigger change order in the design department. And the product would take longer to develop and ship as a result.
So even though I hope the 64bit Intel Atom will still be SeaMicro’s flagship product, I’m also glad they can stay in the fight longer selling into the ‘established’ older data center accounts worldwide. Adapt or die is the cliche adage of some technology writers and I would mark this with a plus (+) in the adapt column.
Related articles
- Don’t call it a wimpy node: SeaMicro rethinks the server for webscale (gigaom.com)
- SeaMicro adds Xeons to Atom smasher microservers (go.theregister.com)
- ‘Low power’ server packs 64 Xeon processors (linuxfordevices.com)
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 