Despite a few vendors building servers around hundreds of low-cost Atom processors, Intel said it isn’t planning on actively targeting the server market with its Atom platform.
“We are not opposed to an Atom-based server, but we just don’t see broad adoption of the Atom as a server chip,” Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s vice president and general manger of its Data Center Group, said earlier this week.
Intel’s stance hasn’t stopped companies like SeaMicro from building Atom-based servers on their own. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in September, SeaMicro showed a server with 512 Atom processors capable of Ethernet switching, server management, and application load-balancing.
Nevertheless, Skaugen contends that customers want energy-efficient, raw performance such as what’s found in Intel’s Xeon line, and that the Atom architecture just isn’t ideally suited for highly parallelized computing.
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