News - Intel won’t push Atom for servers

[HEXUS]

Limited market means chip-giant has no plans to install low-power chips into enterprise boxes.

Read more.

[kellyharding]

Can't see this making much of an impact, Atom is just too slow for such needs i'd think, other than perhaps NAS and clustering of them.

[spoon_]

Thank god for that.

I honestly cannot see Atom CPUs being ever used in servers now that VT is the way to go.

You really want to buy the beefiest server you can get and virtualize the hell out of it

[aidanjt]

Yeah, I can't at all see what use Atom would have in NASes and blades and SOHO and SME boxen.

Can someone at Intel please fire this guy?

[aidanjt]

Thank god for that.

I honestly cannot see Atom CPUs being ever used in servers now that VT is the way to go.

You really want to buy the beefiest server you can get and virtualize the hell out of it

Just don't drop your epic sized basket.

[Moby-Dick]

Actually we dont buy huge monolithic boxes as ESX hosts - just dual socket quad core blades... with 96 GB of Memory

There is a place for the Atom chips , but its not in the enterprise market , The SME/SOHO sector, thats a different matter.

[aidanjt]

That depends on who is maintaining the 'enterprise' network.

[Moby-Dick]

When I say Enterprise I do mean large scale solutions - FTSE 100 sized places. If a workload is small enough to be powered by an atom server , then it'll virtualize beautfully ( there are some exceptions to this but they are in the minority )

I'm sure it'll be a good fit in embedded devices , powering NAS units etc , but generally larger scale storage controllers need a little more horesepower.

Workstation blades perhaps and certianly in thin(ish) clients , although the current trend is to put a little as possible in those.

[aidanjt]

Large scale, say like Google?

[Moby-Dick]

Google would be described as very large scale - they also dont buy "off the shelf" I'm thinking more of the cloud providers who may well use the containerised datacenter model - but will be looking for a higher core density than atoms would offer. Applications that dont horizonatlly scale all that well would be a hard sell for the Atom.

of the 4,000 boxes I look after I'm not seeing any requirements for Atom based servers.