Server Update April 2013: Positioning the HP Moonshot 1500

Intel's Next Generation Low Power Server CPUs

As I was writing this, Intel revealed details of new low-power SoCs for the data center, all coming in 2013.

The Intel Atom™ Processor S12x9 product family for Storage. The Atom s12x9 will get up to 40 lanes of integrated PCIe 2.0 and hardware RAID storage acceleration. With Asynchronous DRAM Self-Refresh (ADR), the Intel Atom S12x9 family can protect critical DRAM data in the event of a power interruption. This is probably the Atom S1200  that will be hard to beat in its intended market.

The Intel Avoton is most likely the first Atom that makes sense for the server market. Built on Intel’s 22nm process technology, using cores based upon the brand new Atom micro architecture "Silvermont," and integrating an Ethernet controller, this Atom holds a lot of promise.  Intel announced that Avoton is now being sampled to customers and the first systems are expected to be available in the second half of 2013. With Avoton, the HP's Moonshot performance per watt ratio will improve significantly.

But even with a new architecture and better integration, the Atom will be facing stiff competition from ARM A15 & A57 based server cores, and even from the newest Intel Xeon processor E3 1200 v3. Intel announced that the low power versions of the Haswell based Xeon will have a TDP as low as 13 Watts. This chip will further blur the line between the "micro server CPUs" and "general purpose CPUs" even further. There is no telling which CPU will be the performance/watt king even in server workloads with relatively low computational demand.