SeaMicro Makes Data-Center-Scale Micro Servers a Reality
According to SeaMicro’s announcement last week, it cooperated with Intel Corporation and Samsung Semiconductor to bring the SeaMicro SM10000 family to market, which includes the SM10000-HD and the newly announced SM10000-XE.
Featuring a quad-core Intel Xeon processor E3-1260L, the SM10000-XE is the most energy efficient, highest-density Intel Xeon server available, and is capable of handling heavyweight, scale-out workloads. The SM10000-HD, in contrast, is based on the Intel Atom processor and is optimized for highly parallel workloads commonly found in the Web tier.
“Today we have announced the lowest-power, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Intel Xeon-based server ever built,” SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman said in a statement. “SeaMicro now brings the benefits of micro servers — efficiency and massive density — to small and larger-core workloads and to all parts of the scale out data center. Combining the SM10000 architecture with the Samsung Green DDR3 memory and Intel Xeon processors, SeaMicro now sets a new bar for energy efficient compute in the datacenter.”
SM10000-XE units can be combined to provide 256 2.4 GHz cores in a 10 rack unit system or 1,024 cores in a standard rack. It supports up to 32 GB of DRAM per socket for a possible system total of 2.04 terabytes.
These high-performance processors are tied together by SeaMicro’s Freedom Supercompute Fabric, which delivers 12 times the bandwidth per unit compute of a traditional server. To meet this end, SeaMicro created second-generation fabric technology known as fabric ASIC designed to work with large core CPUs like the Xeon and small ones such as the Atom.
The SM10000-XE is now available worldwide for a list price of $138,000 for a base configuration.
