Intel Announces Atom-Based Centerton for Low-Energy Microservers

Chip giant Intel has announced its first Atom chip-based microserver platform, designed to cut costs and power consumption in data centres.

The system-on-a-chip, referred to as Centerton, was mentioned by the company’s vice president Diane Bryant at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Beijing. It burns less than 10W and uses the Atom, originally designed for mobile devices, as the basis of tiny data centre servers.

Intel enters the microserver market

At the IDF last year, Intel’s Naveen Bohra indicated that a sub-10W processor would arrive at some point in 2012. Centerton is set fulfil that claim, clocking in at a mere six watts on Intel’s TDP (thermal design power) scale, and making it significantly more efficient than the company’s current least power-hungry processor, which consumes 15 watts.

Centerton will have two 32-nanometre processing cores, will support 64-bit code, and will have error-correction code memory, VentureBeat reports. Additionally, the SoC will be capable of hypervisor-based virtualisation and is expected to ship some time in the second half of 2012.

Intel’s jump into Atom-chipped microservers follows much-lauded efforts by SeaMicro in using both Xeon and Atom chips in low-power systems. The supposed ‘rising star’ of the IT industry was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for $334 million (£211m) earlier this year, in a move that seemingly irked Intel.

“We just looked at SeaMicro’s fabric,” Bryant said at the time. “They came to us and asked if we would be interested in it, or in licensing the technology. We were not impressed, and we declined. Very soon after, we saw that our competitor bought it.”

She added that Intel had “a very robust and compelling roadmap” for the microserver market. The company estimates that microservers could represent up to 10 percent of the overall server market by 2015, making Centerton a crucial first step along said roadmap.

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