Servers With Cellphone Chips? Yep, Here They Come


Enterprise Computing

The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which all battle energy costs on a huge scale.

SeaMicro, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has put together a server based on Intel‘s Atom chip, which currently slots into things like netbooks and other mobile computing devices. Intel expects Atom to drive its cell phone strategy in the coming years as well.

Exact details on the SeaMicro product have been tough to come by, since the company remains inside the cone of silence, but people familiar with SeaMicro’s hardware say it will pack about 80 Atom chips in a very small chassis. The company also has some proprietary hardware and software twists, these people said.

The vast majority of servers sold today run on Intel’s Xeon chip, which is the company’s top-of-the-line mainstream product. Such chips are great for demanding software that manages databases or renders special effects in a movie. But they’re overkill for things like feeding up a Facebook profile page or displaying a Google search box.

Today’s phone and mobile device chips have quite a bit of horsepower. They’re able to handle the popular iPhone applications and to power netbooks.

By using Atom, SeaMicro can lower the power consumption of its servers, while still giving customers enough oomph to tackle Internet-centric tasks.

“Making a generalist machine is no longer good enough,” said Andrew Feldman, the chief executive at SeaMicro. “The right system will require real engineering work. That is something the server market hasn’t seen in a long time.”

Industry observers will note that Khosla Ventures has invested in SeaMicro. Vinod Khosla was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and has been a major advocate of so-called green technology.

In Austin, Texas, there lurks another start-up called Smooth-Stone. According to people familiar with its plans, Smooth-Stone is working on a chip using the ARM architecture that will go into servers. ARM chips from companies like Samsung and Qualcomm typically make their way into phones like the iPhone.

Barry Evans, the chief executive of Smooth-Stone, did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Mr. Evans worked at Intel for many years in the company’s communications and mobile products groups.

In May, Dell began selling servers that run on laptop chips from Via to select customers. Like the start-ups, Dell has tried to design a product that fits the needs of Internet-based companies.

Along with Dell, the big guys like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and SGI (well, kind of big) make low-power servers for Internet companies by using less power hungry versions of the Xeon chip from Intel. That said, the energy savings of a server based on an Atom or ARM chip would be much bigger.

The notion for these types of products isn’t exactly new. The blade server start-up RLX sold very thin servers that ran on laptop chips from Transmeta about 10 years ago. In addition, Cobalt Networks, which Sun acquired for $2 billion in 2000 — take a deep breath, Mr. McNealy — had a type of server appliance that relied on lower-power chips. Both efforts, however, ran smack into the dot-com bust at which point server companies lost interest in catering to Internet companies.

With Google, Facebook and a host of companies without vowels in their names being all the rage, it seems that the low-power, tailored approach has returned.

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Any computer running a program that waits for connections on an IP port is a server. If it waits on port 443 or 80, it’s probably a web server. Port 21, a FTP server. Port 25, a SMTP server. Et cetera.

It doesn’t matter if it’s running on a cell phone or in a rack in a data center, or what brand or model of CPU it has. It’s just code and it runs on computers. Anywhere.

So they’re using Atoms? OK. They’re good with power management, and that cuts cooling costs, too. There will be more such products.

The title is disengenuous – Atom chips aren’t really used in current cellphones at all. Intel might want them to, but they ain’t there yet.

Don’t forget also that IBM’s BlueGene/L, the world’s fastest supercomputer when built in 2004, is based on the same idea. They achieved massive parallelism and using 131,072 (128K) low-power PowerPC 440 processors — the same processors used in embedded applications like cable TV set-top boxes.

Stealth Mode?

It’s a sea of micros created by introducing an interconnect processor between the cpu/mem and disks/network. No more ethernet switches or io cards or their software drivers. Think of it as sea (created by the interconnect fabric) of cpu nodes and i/o nodes swimming together where the software just sees everything as point to point sockets. Add nodes as required.

Hey Tom, READ the story:

“Smooth-Stone is working on a chip using the ARM architecture that will go into servers.”

@Bill: That was my first reaction, too. Heck, a “server” is a software daemon that deals with software clients, and not a dedicated physical device at all.

But I think “server” here means “the type of boxen most often used to provision datacenters,” and the argument is that a machine configuration with many low-power CPUs can be more economical or reasonable on the server side for some types of client-server applications.

Still, “server” is by now too weak a term for serious tech journalism. Though for different reasons, “server” means nothing to both the general audience and the technical audience.


At Microsoft, we considered running Web Search using Atom processors and found it is a noteworthy competitor, albeit with some system-level deficiencies that will require improvements in the future. Here is a link to our project for those are interested: //

SAP uses such servers. So it is a good thing!

Would I rather buy a specialized low power server or buy a full powered one that I could utilize a number of ways with virtualization?

I guess licensing costs would be the determining factor.

@MitchP:: If throughput is your metric, then low-power servers are much better off because you can more than likely pack a whole load of small cores for the same transistor area and power budgets. There are also additional circuit-level benefits surrounding processor packaging costs etc. that all result in low-power servers delivering overall better performance/$ and performance/W at the end of the day.

This topic will be a hot ride for a while in the coming years, at least until the hype fades. So it will be fun to see what happens over the coming years.