Sea Micro defines a little green server

June 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've been blogging about the idea of a Little Green Server watching for companies who embrace the idea that smaller is better. I checked my blog and I wrote about the idea Intel Atom Servers in July 2008.

Sea Micro came out of its quiet period, and made quite a bit of noise.

The one I am waiting for next is ARM Servers.

From the momentum it looks like the idea of Intel Atom servers is going to be deployed.

SeaMicro in the News

June 14, 2010

Wall Street Journal: SeaMicro Tries to Rethink the Internet Server

Not many people start computer companies these days, with fierce competition and dog-eat-dog pricing making other businesses seem much more appealing. But SeaMicro is going for it, in an unusual way.

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June 14, 2010

EE Times: Startup SeaMicro packs 512 Intel Atoms in server. SM10000 seen as first in wave of Atom, ARM-based servers

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Startup SeaMicro announced Monday (June 14) a server that packs 512 Intel Atom processors in a 10U chassis to deliver the same performance at a fraction of their power and space as systems using conventional server CPUs.

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June 13, 2010

Venture Beat: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

Coming out of stealth, SeaMicro is dispelling the Silicon Valley myth that you can’t innovate in hardware anymore. The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.

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June 13, 2010

GIGAOM: SeaMicro’s Low-power Server Finally Launches

SeaMicro, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup building a low-power server using Atom chips and its own specially designed silicon to manage the networking, has finally unveiled its hardware, and it’s pretty darn impressive.

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June 13, 2010

IDG/PC World: SeaMicro's Cloud Server Sports 512 Atom Processors

SeaMicro has developed a server that packs in 512 low-power Intel Atom processors on miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, the company announced Monday.

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June 13, 2010

Fast Company: Google's Power-Hogging Server Farms Versus SeaMicro's Super-Efficient Supercomputers

The computer server industry may not sound like a hotbed for innovation to you, but SeaMicro thinks differently. It's just rocked the server world with a super-computer-like product that's smaller and more power-efficient than any rival's.

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June 14, 2010

DailyTech: SeaMicro Launches Microtransaction Server Featuring 512 Atom CPUs

Taking multi-core to an extreme

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June 14, 2010

earth2tech: SeaMicro Unveils Low Power Server

Get ready to start hearing a whole lot more about stealthy low-power server maker SeaMicro.

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June 14, 2010

Data Center Knowledge: SeaMicro Unveils its Low Power Server

Startup server maker SeaMicro today unveiled a new low-power server that promises to slash power costs for companies running large Internet services and cloud computing platforms.

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June 14, 2010

eWeek: SeaMicro Uses Intel Atom Chip in Server Architecture

Startup SeaMicro is unveiling its SM10000 server, which takes advantage of the small and highly energy efficient Intel Atom processors and its own I/O virtualization technology to create a computing architecture that is highly scalable and drives down server power and space costs by as much as 75 percent over traditional systems.

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June 14, 2010

CRN UK: SeaMicro shakes up server arena

Start-up vendor SeaMicro has slammed what it sees as a lack of innovation in the server market as it launches into the UK channel.

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June 14, 2010

Information Week: SeaMicro Intros Server With 512 Atom Processors

Silicon Valley startup SeaMicro has unveiled a 10U rack-mount server that uses 512 low-power, Intel Atom processors to dramatically cut energy consumption and space in the data center.

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June 14, 2010

Wired: Startup Builds Power-Efficient Servers With Netbook Chips

Atom chips are the underpowered CPUs inside most netbooks. But one company has found a way to stitch 512 of them together to create a single powerful server.

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June 14, 2010

CNET: Start-up launches DOE-backed green server

Start-up SeaMicro has launched a green server based on Intel's power-sipping Atom processor. The company is backed by about $25 million in venture capital and a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

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June 14, 2010

AnandTech: SeaMicro Announces SM10000 Server with 512 Atom CPUs and Low Power Consumption

Two years ago when I first covered Intel’s Atom architecture I proposed that Moore’s Law has paved the way for two things: 1) ridiculously fast microprocessors, and 2) fast enough microprocessors.

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June 14, 2010

Server Watch: SeaMicro Launches an Atom-Powered Cloud Computing Server

With 512 Atom processors in a 10u rack mounted unit, SeaMicro is defying not just conventional wisdom of what makes a Web server, but server design as well.

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January 06, 2010

Data Center Knowledge: SeaMicro, More Than Just Low-Power Servers

Stealthy startup SeaMicro isn’t saying much about its technology, which aims to “revolutionize the data center landscape” by slashing the power used in IT operations.

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January 06, 2010

GigaOM: SeaMicro’s Secret Server Changes Computing Economics

SeaMicro, a stealthy server company based in Santa Clara, Calif., today scored $9.3 million from the Department of Energy as part of a program to encourage data center efficiency.

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January 06, 2010

earth2tech: SeaMicro, A Server Maker That Could Change the Game of Computing Power

When the Department of Energy announced that it was awarding 14 data center efficiency projects $47 million this morning, one name piqued my interest: SeaMicro.

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Ubuntu's Founder saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Mark Shuttleworth writes a post that got my attention.

At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture. There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different. I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks. That’s new.

Who is Mark Shuttleworth?

Biography

Mark is founder of the Ubuntu Project, an enterprise Linux distribution that is freely available worldwide and has both cutting-edge desktop and enterprise server editions, and has become very popular.

The founder of Ubuntu felt tangible different at the Ubuntu Developer Summit seeing enthusiasm for ARM based Servers and Cloud Computing.

And Mark is excited about the Linaro announcement.

So I’m very excited at today’s announcement of Linaro, an initiative by the ARM partner ecosystem including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM. That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.

Linaro is using open source ideas, and Mark plans to keep Ubuntu in sync with Linaro.

Linaro is impressively open: www.linaro.org has details of open engineering summits, an open wiki, mailing lists etc. The teams behind the work are committed to upstreaming their output so it will appear in all the distributions, sooner or later. The images produced will all be royalty free. And we’re working closely with the Linaro team, so the cadence of the releases will be rigorous, with a six month cycle that enables Linaro to include all work that happens in Ubuntu in each release of Linaro. There isn’t a “whole new distribution”, because a lot of the work will happen upstream, and where bits are needed, they will be derived from Ubuntu and Debian, which is quite familiar to many developers.

For more information about Linaro here is an executive PDF.

And Mark does an excellent job of pointing out the value of Linaro.

The nature of the work seems to break down into four different areas.

First, there are teams focused on enabling specific new hardware from each of the participating vendors. Over time, we’ll see real convergence in the kernel used, with work like Grant Likely’s device tree forming the fabric by which differences can be accommodated in a unified kernel. As an aside, we think we can harness the same effort in Ubuntu on other architectures as well as ARM to solve many of the thorny problems in linux audio support.

Second, there are teams focused on the middleware which is common to all platforms: choosing APIs and ensuring that those are properly maintained and documented so that people can deliver any different user experience with best-of-breed open tools.

Third, there are teams focused on advancing the state of the art. For example, these teams might accelerate the evolution of the compiler technology, or the graphics subsystem, or provide new APIs for multitouch gestures, or geolocation. That work benefits the entire ecosystem equally.

And finally, there are teams aimed at providing out of the box “heads” for different user experiences. By “head” we mean a particular user experience, which might range from the minimalist (console, for developers) to the sophisticated (like KDE for a netbook). Over time, as more partners join, the set of supported “heads” will grow – ideally in future you’ll be able to bring up a Gnome head, or a KDE head, or a Chrome OS head, or an Android head, or a MeeGo head, trivially. We already have goot precedent for this in Ubuntu with support for KDE, Gnome, LXE and server heads, so everyone’s confident this will work well.

The diversity in the Linux ecosystem is fantastic. In part, Linaro grows that diversity: there’s a new name that folks need to be aware of and think about. But importantly, Linaro also serves to simplify and unify pieces of the ecosystem that have historically been hard to bring together. If you know Ubuntu, then you’ll find Linaro instantly familiar: we’ll share repositories to a very large extent, so things that “just work” in Ubuntu will “just work” with Linaro too.

When you read this and go back to Mark's learning about the interest for ARM Servers, do you have any doubt Linux ARM Servers will be coming soon to the data center?

Marvell planning ARM Server 1/5 power vs. x86

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

EETimes has an article about Marvell's next ARM processers for Servers.

Marvell plans 40-nm ARM server processors
Partners include one working on port of Windows to ARM

Rick Merritt
EE Times
(05/10/2010 7:52 PM EDT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Marvell Technology Group Ltd. aims to supply silicon for ARM-based servers with 40-nm multicore processors it will ship this year. It is working with multiple partners including one that hopes to port a server version of Microsoft Windows to ARM.

"We have on the road map quad-core symmetric multiprocressing enterprise ARM-based SoCs that will be here soon," said Simon Milner, vice president of Marvell's enterprise group. "There's a huge opportunity here because the market is x86 dominated and ARM can bring power consumption breakthroughs into this space," he said.

The new chips will offer more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption compared to x86 processors that dominate the server market, Marvell claims. Earlier this year, Marvell announced its Armada 310 that runs at a gigahertz while consuming 700 milliW and will scale to 2 GHz at less than a Watt, Milner said.

And there are ARM servers even planned for Windows.

At least one partner is working on a port of a server version Microsoft Windows to ARM, and has access to some of the low level code needed for that job. "That is a large undertaking," said Milner.

Other partners are working on ports to ARM of x86 virtualization software also strategic for the server market. Some server customers are asking for 64-bit support, but "subsets of the server market can be addressed with 32 bits," Milner said.

For Marvell, the server initiative is one in a series of efforts since it acquired from Intel the XScale ARM design and an ARM architectural license.

"We have had significant success in the last five years taking ARM into new segments such as communications infrastructure and networking systems," he said.

ARM outperforms Atom in benchmark, watch for the business model for benchmark companies

May 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Anyone who has been in the tech industry knows to take benchmarks statements “with a grain of salt.” Linley group has a post on the ARM outmuscling the Atom processor.

ARM Outmuscles Atom on Benchmark

ARM—and, for that matter, MIPS—CPUs outperform Intel’s Atom, at least as measured by the CoreMark benchmark when normalized for frequency. ARM rates its Cortex-A9 at 2.9 CoreMark per MHz (CM/MHz), whereas Atom running a single instance of the benchmark achieves only 1.8 CM/MHz. In fact, all of the single-thread CPUs profiled in Table 1 outperform Atom in terms of per-clock performance.

Linley provides a table.

The business plug is to buy Linley’s report. So, their motivation is to sell research, not to support research paid for by Intel, ARM, or a vendor.

In our latest report on CPU IP, we look further at the midrange and high-end CPU cores from ARM, MIPS, and others, including both household names and obscure companies, such as IBM and Beyond Semiconductor. The report compares not just performance but also die area, power consumption, and microarchitecture features. As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs. When combined with the latest DSP, video decoding, and graphics technology, these CPUs imbue consumer electronics and communications systems with capabilities far beyond what seemed conceivable a few years ago. --Joe

Joseph Byrne, senior analyst

The sentence above that gets people’s attention is this one.

As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs.

The competition that will be interesting us in the Data Center space is SeaMicro (Intel Atom) vs. Smooth-Stone (ARM).

As James Hamilton mentions in his blog.

Over the past year I’ve met with both Smooth Stone and SeaMicro frequently and it’s great to see more information about both available broadly. The very low power server trend is real and advancing quickly. When purchasing servers, it needs to be all about work done per dollar and work done per joule.

Are ARM Servers the disruptive change coming to Green the Data Center? Smooth-Stone is trying

April 28, 2010 Dave Ohara

GigaOm has a post on ARM taking on Intel in the Data Centers.

ARM Ready To Take On Intel in Servers

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 28, 2010, 3:15pm PDT 2 Comments

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ARM plc has confirmed that within the next 12 months its architecture, which is currently used primarily in cell phones and consumer electronics, will also be used in servers — pitting it against the lifeblood of Intel’s chip business. Speaking with EETimes, Warren East, the CEO of ARM, said servers using ARM-based chips should appear within the year.

The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM’s server ambitions. And it’s not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture. We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company’s eXtreme Computing group.

I blogged about this idea in May 19, 2009.

Energy efficiency is a new focus for many, and much to the frustration of Intel, AMD, and Server OEMs, not everyone wants a multi-core high cost chip.

So, what’s next?

ARM based servers that can be even higher performance per watt.

Don’t know who has done this, but given the hardware ecosystem, there are people who have experimented with this and Linux OSs. The popularity of ARM chips in mobile devices is where the knowledge exists for low power solutions.

Why not take a mobile device, an iPhone and turn it into a server.

GigaOm has a specific post about Smooth-Stone.

Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 9, 2010, 10:00am PDT 2 Comments

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Smooth-Stone CEO Barry Evans

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.”

However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans thinks yes, and I think the IP licensing company behind the architecture does too, because it appears to be cooking up something that involves using its architecture inside servers. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc, declined to talk to me for this story, saying the timing was not yet right to talk about the company and servers “for a few reasons that I can’t discuss.”

What is hilarious is while I was reading the GigaOm post about ARM taking on Intel, I am sitting in the car as a passenger next to Barry Evans sharing a ride from the airport, and had met three other Smooth-Stone executives that morning for breakfast thanks to a well connected data center insider.

What is Smooth-stone?

Founded in January 2008, Smooth‐Stone brings ultra‐low power mobile phone technology to the datacenter. Smooth-Stone has brought together leading engineers with experience in volume and blade server platforms, mainframes, server CPUs, networking processors, telecom infrastructure, and high performance cellular application processors and cell phone system-on-chips. With depth in both hardware and software design and development the Smooth-Stone team is uniquely positioned to deliver a complete low power solution.

Smooth-Stone technology, combined with the industry-standard ARM architecture and tools, enables truly green datacenters.

Note the last sentence "enables truly green datacenters."

I did write a brief post about Smooth Stone in Oct 2009, but it was hard to find any other information.

Here is information in local papers. Austin Business Journal.

Smooth-Stone Inc., which is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and develops low power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment from the state with potential for $1 million in total investment for the commercialization of its technology.

“Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Perficient Inc. and chairman of the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.

Now that I know 4 executives from the Smooth Stone team and they know what I do besides write a blog you can expect I'll have more to say in the future about Smooth-stone as they are talking to the right companies and people who have a passion for greening the data center with a change in server hardware.

I had a great time talking to the executives at Smooth-Stone about ARM chip, data center industry, IT issues, energy efficiency, and our backgrounds. I've been talking to some folks at ARM and other big data center users about the same ideas and our paths were crossing. There is a perfect storm coming to data centers with a good chance ARM chips will be the power efficiency behind the change. The environment and customers are going to be happy with the change, the current data center ecosystem will have to adapt fast once the change happens as it is not hard to crank out lots of ARM servers given ARM is the most popular processor now thanks to the mobile industry.