SeaMicro Unveils 512 Atom-Based Server

1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat."

Comments

What's the "bang for the buck"?

[TeXMaster]

The question is, how good is the performance for, say, intensive numerical computations? Is the gigaflop per watt convenient?

Re:What's the "bang for the buck"?

[jandrese]

But traditional web servers aren't CPU bound, they're IO bound at high connection rates. It might help if you need to do a whole lot of https traffic, but even then this smells of overkill. If you're really planning to use this as a webserver, I'd be a whole lot more interested in the IO backplane and the available IO ports to the server.

Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster of...

[TheRaven64]

Clusters are still very much alive. They're cheap to build and give you a lot of computing power to play with. If anyone mentions Beowulf when describing them, however, it's a good clue that they have no idea what they are talking about.