Intel's Atom gets used in... servers?
By Nilay Patel 
posted Jul 21st 2008 5:04PM
posted Jul 21st 2008 5:04PM
posted Jul 21st 2008 5:04PM
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Its funny because the chipset takes 12x more power than the CPU.
at first I thought it was cheap, but then I thought...
I could run a Quake 2 Server with this.
*Quad plus Power Amp Tech sound*
and thats why 4chan's down.
mmmmmmmmm, atom. aughhhhhhh
actually those specs are better than many of the serial ata network attached storage solutions currently on the market.
My evil enemy strikes again...
Sooo...are you his good enemy?
I guess I really am the odd one in the middle of all of this, right?
Shut it Jatson
I believe it's your negaself from Earth Minus One.
Everyone is my evil enemy. they all wanna eat me
I wonder if these guys would be useful in a large, distributed environment like the Google.
>:-O
excited.
Take an array of say 100 of these and they could easily be a front end web server. Your internet pipe is your battleneck anyways.
lol battleneck, awesome typo.
I'd imagine that this machine is easily as fast as a high end server was only 6-7 years ago, and it's probably more reliable due to the decreased heat dissipation. I bet it could easily handle a moderate blog with tens of thousands of RSS subscribers (assuming that the rss is statically cached) and thousands of comments a day.
I know that my last company load tested a server with similar performance as the official web-retailer for several Grammy winning artists on a single box running a custom Java e-commerce application. Similar hardware handled millions of unique IPs a month and carried a load average well below 0.5. We pushed all traffic onto one server and left the other servers in hot-standby and left it like that for several weeks without issue.
What do you think this is? /.??
Well you'd not run engadget a single Atom :) but most (of our...) hosting customers don't run engadget, they run about tens of different small or medium sites with a mix of technologies. For that you need gobs of memory much more than CPU, and the Atom's speed is still around that of a few years-old P4 / Pentium M which should still be very nippy.
Finally, the Bloch man arrives to talk some sense. For people just doing light webhosting, why do you need a supercomputer? Cutting power consumption is a good thing, something that is becoming increasingly important in todays environmentally conscious world.
Would also be interesting replacement unit for my 2.something ghz p4 home server that gets hot enough to fry on.
That's a terrible price! I'm co-lo'ing a Xeon 5130 box (2 x 2GHz Core 2 based Xeon) for £34 a month with 10TB bandwidth, and that's with rapidswitch!
You'd be a fool to run a server on an atom for that price.... PS, I bought the processor for £16 on ebay.... :)
I think co-lo was potentially the wrong choice of words, these are dedicated servers where the hardware is provided and maintained by Bytemark. Swapping out failed drives and other 3am work therefore isn't your headache!
http://www.rapidswitch.com/DedicatedServers.aspx
They do have a decent value server which is £39/mo but upgrading it to 2GB RAM and two hard drives to get RAID-1 requires upgrade to £84/mo server so I'd still contend it's pretty decent value.
Grammar 101:
ex·it
1. The act of going away or out.
2. A passage or way out: an emergency exit in a theater; took the second exit on the throughway.
3. The departure of a performer from the stage.
4. Death.
ex·cit·ed
1. stirred emotionally; agitated: An excited crowd awaited the arrival of the famed rock group.
2. stimulated to activity; brisk: an excited buying and selling of stocks.
How much of a difference can one missed 'c' make?
Well w00t, that's comparing apples with oranges - dedicated server providers buy the hardware for you, and guarantee a repair or replacement due to hardware fault within a particular time (4 working hours / 24 hours for Bytemark). With co-lo you have to buy your server, then fix it yourself when it breaks. If those terms work for you, of course the price should be lower.
This is a huge step backwards Sort of like those crappy low power blades IBM do.
A VPS (Xen/Zones/UML) timeslice gives you something of roughly equivalent power, though without the pain of so many physical machines to manage. And it's a lot easier to use bigger slices of a beefy server than try to cluster these little things when you need to scale up.
Guaranteeing resources under a virtualization layer is quite hard, particularly things like I/O management when you've got a couple of systems which are swapping extremely heavily. It quickly affects performance for the rest of the systems on the host, which for certain applications is completely unacceptable - therefore dedicated hardware becomes their choice of hosting platform.
So what's the question is about?
If it's just a pure web w/o anything hardly consuming cpu -- why not? I
For sure it's not for sourceforge.net or cnn.com, or whenever like that.
I do remember when it was ok to run a server with web+squid+samba+sendmail+nat+... on a 486sx25 box. It was ok.
I still don't see how that price works..
At that much a month surely it would be better just to BUY the computer and get decent unlimited web hosting?
WHAT? Is this a Joke? You can easily get a decent shared virtual server for that price...
The point is the fact that its a dedicated.
Besides, for a EU based server, thats pretty cheap, especially for a dedicated.
I wonder how much they charge for colo-ing a 6502 server with 3KB RAM expansion pack running VIC-20 BASIC...
£45
Less power=less heat
Less power, and less heat means less up keep.
Makes sense that these would make perfect servers.
Well Atom was devloped for UMPCS and other protable computers. So a server that is stationary should use a more powerful CPU instead of a crappy mobile CPU.
I've said it once
http://kylehasegawa.com/content/building-the-perfect-soho-firewall-router
and I'll say it again. Atom are perfect for routers.
I can guarantee that this server is very good for
Servers need Ram a lot not much CPU.
Linux will cache the data in the memory and it will be pretty much fast for most usage of webservers, such as apache+mysql + rails/php etc....
and, im sure engadget would run fine on the 2GB ram server.
Here's why this is a step in the right direction:
Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/
When you pay for virtual server hosting - the physical box is probably so overladen you are getting less grunt than the atom anyway!