SeaMicro Packs 64 Quad-Core Xeons into 10U

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Today SeaMicro got a lot of media attention with the launch of the “first fabric-based Intel Xeon micro server,” the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. While the company has been shipping Intel Atom-based servers for a while now, this unexpected move to puts Sandy Bridge Xeons into the same highly dense form factor.

Today we have announced the lowest-power, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Intel® Xeon®–based server ever built,” says Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro. “SeaMicro now brings the benefits of micro servers—efficiency and massive density—to small and larger-core workloads and to all parts of the scale out data center. Combining the SM10000 architecture with the Samsung Green DDR3 memory and Intel® Xeon® processors, SeaMicro now sets a new bar for energy efficient compute in the datacenter.”

So how was SeaMicro able to pull this off? Rachel King writes that it was a clever combination of partner technologies:

  • Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture and Xeon processors
  • SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric ASIC (optimized to work with large-core and small-core CPUs, shrinks the size of the motherboard to the size of a standard business card)
  • Samsung’s energy efficient Green DDR3 RAM (half the size of a standard memory module)

Before we get you too excited about HPC for this box, it is worth noting that that the device has a shared-nothing architecture. But with the the ability to support 1024 Xeon cores in a rack, the datacenter future is looking bright for SeaMicro.

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