Intel Announces Low Power Xeon and Atom Micro Server Products

hothardware.com

16 pointsMojoKid3 comments

Doesn't virtualization make this sort of thing obsolete? If your performance requirements are modest enough to work on a micro server, wouldn't they work in a virtualized environment? It seems like it'd be cheaper (software does the work hardware is doing here), easier on maintenance and provide high availability in a virtualized environment as well. I'm not talking big iron, I'm talking $3-$5k boxes which seem to be the sweet spot.

Something like this might be good for a smaller business with machines on-site. You could replace a rack of beefy heat generating boxes with a few of these and save on power+AC bills.

From a data center perspective, I think it has some merit too. If they produce the machines in small little blade-type servers that you can just plug into a box, wouldn't that simplify maintenance? And for availability, if a box dies, it doesn't take down 20 different vms with it.

Interesting spin by Intel. Having recently priced out power and cooling costs I can see where ARM hopes to be, but Intel having a 64bit offering before ARM does is definitely an advantage. Now if the chipsets let me put 96GB on each chip (sadly another 36 - 50 watts) we'll really be interested.

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