Intel's Atom gets used in... servers?

Sure, we've been excited about Intel's Atom CPU being used in netbook-class devices, but UK ISP Bytemark apparently thinks the power-sipping chip has the horsepower to handle low-end server duties as well. For £45 ($89) a month, you can colo a 1.6GHz Atom box running Linux with 2GB of RAM and a pair of 100GB SATA drives -- not a terrible deal, and probably a damn sight more reliable than a pile of duct tape or a dead frog. Still, we're not exactly sure we'd want to run our business on the rough equivalent of an Eee 901, you know?

[rektide @ Jul 21st 2008 5:08PM]

Its funny because the chipset takes 12x more power than the CPU.

[Flashpoint @ Jul 21st 2008 6:13PM]

at first I thought it was cheap, but then I thought...

I could run a Quake 2 Server with this.

[Podaman @ Jul 21st 2008 6:41PM]

*Quad plus Power Amp Tech sound*

[neofolklore @ Jul 22nd 2008 7:53AM]

and thats why 4chan's down.

[collegekid13 @ Jul 21st 2008 5:14PM]

mmmmmmmmm, atom. aughhhhhhh

[Jason @ Jul 21st 2008 5:14PM]

actually those specs are better than many of the serial ata network attached storage solutions currently on the market.

[jason @ Jul 21st 2008 5:20PM]

My evil enemy strikes again...

[roflercopterer @ Jul 21st 2008 5:44PM]

Sooo...are you his good enemy?

[J@son @ Jul 21st 2008 6:02PM]

I guess I really am the odd one in the middle of all of this, right?

[The Apple @ Jul 21st 2008 6:18PM]

Shut it Jatson

[Podaman @ Jul 21st 2008 6:43PM]

I believe it's your negaself from Earth Minus One.

[El Taco @ Jul 21st 2008 8:24PM]

Everyone is my evil enemy. they all wanna eat me

[Ed @ Jul 21st 2008 5:34PM]

I wonder if these guys would be useful in a large, distributed environment like the Google.

[Evan @ Jul 21st 2008 5:40PM]

excited.

[ja$on @ Jul 21st 2008 5:41PM]

>:-O

[retro77 @ Jul 21st 2008 5:42PM]

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.

[Wolfticket @ Jul 21st 2008 6:12PM]

lol battleneck, awesome typo.

[David Ron @ Jul 21st 2008 5:49PM]

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.

[roflercopterer @ Jul 21st 2008 9:33PM]

What do you think this is? /.??

[Matthew Bloch @ Jul 21st 2008 5:50PM]

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.

[matt @ Jul 22nd 2008 3:27AM]

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.

[w00t @ Jul 21st 2008 5:52PM]

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.... :)

[Alex Howells @ Jul 21st 2008 6:12PM]

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.

[Tejas @ Jul 21st 2008 6:12PM]

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?

[Matthew Bloch @ Jul 21st 2008 6:13PM]

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.

[Dick Davies @ Jul 21st 2008 6:30PM]

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.

[Alex Howells @ Jul 21st 2008 6:52PM]

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.

[rezdm @ Jul 21st 2008 6:41PM]

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.

[Josh @ Jul 21st 2008 6:47PM]

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?

[loosely_coupled @ Jul 21st 2008 7:01PM]

WHAT? Is this a Joke? You can easily get a decent shared virtual server for that price...

[Joshua Walters @ Jul 21st 2008 8:08PM]

The point is the fact that its a dedicated.

Besides, for a EU based server, thats pretty cheap, especially for a dedicated.

[LondonConsultant @ Jul 21st 2008 7:47PM]

I wonder how much they charge for colo-ing a 6502 server with 3KB RAM expansion pack running VIC-20 BASIC...

[A.C.E.R. @ Jul 21st 2008 8:17PM]

£45

[Joshua Walters @ Jul 21st 2008 7:58PM]

Less power=less heat

Less power, and less heat means less up keep.

Makes sense that these would make perfect servers.

[Samuel Wat @ Jul 21st 2008 10:01PM]

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.

[Fred @ Jul 22nd 2008 6:14AM]

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.

[Russ @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:19PM]

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!

[kylehase @ Jan 24th 2009 7:38AM]

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.