Intel thinks 10 per cent of servers will run Atom chips by 2015

CHIPMAKER Intel expects that low power servers will make up at least 10 per cent of the market by 2015.

Dylan Larson, director of the Xeon platform at Intel told journalists that the days of designing chips with higher frequencies and greater numbers of cores might be coming to an end, with Intel's customers looking at 'extreme density'. Larson said that by 2015 he expects that single socket 'microservers' will make up 10 per cent of the server market.

Larson said, "The market is moving beyond two and four socket and into extreme density with 'microservers' that use power efficient processors." As for what chips will end up in those servers, it could be Atom, but Larson said it won't be an Atom in its current form, saying that it will need to have features such as ECC memory support.

It is surprising that one of Intel's top Xeon guys is pitching the use of lightweight processors, however Larson said that when Intel does release single-socket microservers it will be under the Xeon brand. Larson's comments also suggest that other chip design houses, especially ARM, will have to do more than just offer low power efficiency if they want to get into the microserver game.

Intel was cagey when it came to the question of whether microservers, whether they be based on many discrete Atom processors or multi-core Atom chips, will eat into its Xeon chip business. Larson said that there will be "no blink in investment of Xeon processors, it is still the volume generator [for Intel]".

Another interesting development is the differentiation between multi-core and multi-socket processors. Larson said the decision on what type of server and more specifically the chip to use is workload dependant and that there could be a hierarchy of servers where front-end servers execute queries that are handled by 'fat' servers.

Whether Intel slaps a Xeon label on its Atom processor or not, the server chip market seems to be following the consumer chip trend of shying away from large monolithic chips. µ