AMD to acquire SeaMicro

[Zor Prime]

I think AMD should next acquire SeaFoam. Then their portfolio will sound really cool.

That's actually not a bad idea ... They could introduce nano-bots to clean carbon deposits off cylinder walls, etc ...

 

[cbn]

Not at all, a traditional server uses a large motherboard, LAN card/cables, Hard Drive, etc, regardless what CPU is inside, so you are still gaining all that plus using less space.

All 768 individual servers in a SeaMicro box don’t have 768 drives, they share one SAN.

I wonder how much energy savings we could be looking at compared to the Calxeda server?

http://arstechnica.com/business/new...-new-quad-core-arm-part-for-cloud-servers.ars

It’s helpful to contrast Calxeda’s approach with that of its main x86-based competitor, SeaMicro. SeaMicro makes a complete, high-density server product based on Intel’s low-power Atom chips that is built on many of the principles described above. Aside from the choice of Atom over ARM, the main place that SeaMicro’s credit-card-sized dual-Atom server nodes differ from Calxeda’s EnergyCards is in the way that the latter handles disk and networking I/O.

As described above, the Calxeda system virtualizes Ethernet traffic so that the EnergyCards don’t need physical Ethernet ports or cables in order to do networking. They do, however, need physical SATA cables for mass storage, so in a dense design you’ll have to thread SATA cables from each EnergyCard to each hard drive card. SeaMicro, in contrast, virtualizes both Ethernet and SATA interfaces, so that the custom fabric switch on each SeaMicro node carries both networking and storage traffic off of the card. By putting all the SATA drives in a separate physical unit and connecting it to the SeaMicro nodes via this virtual interface, SeaMicro systems save on power and cooling vs. Calxeda (again, the latter has physical SATA ports on each card for connecting physical drives). So that’s one advantage that SeaMicro has.

One disadvantage that SeaMicro has is that it has to use off-the-shelf Atom chips. Because SeaMicro can’t design its own custom SoC blocks and integrate them with Atom cores on the same die, the company uses a separate physical ASIC that resides on each SeaMicro card to do the storage and networking virtualization. This ASIC is the analog to the on-die fabric switch in Calxeda’s SoC.

Note that SeaMicro’s current server product is Atom-based, but the company has made clear that it won’t necessarily restrict itself to Atom in the future. So Calxeda had better be on the lookout for some ARM-based competition from SeaMicro in the high-density cloud server arena.