

SeaMicro drops another Atom bomb on the server market - thankuz
http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/27/seamicro-64bit-atom-servers/

======
ck2
First of all, Atom CPU is only "efficient" power-wise when it's sitting idle
most of the time.

It's not efficient per task accomplished for power used.

Secondly, "dropping an atom bomb onto *" happens to reference one of the most
horrible things the United States has done to any other country, regardless if
you agree if it was unnecessary or not, so implying the reference is very
distasteful.

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jrockway
This article would be much better if they used the hilariously-clever
expression "atom bomb" even more times in the first paragraph.

Oh wait, no.

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athst
Clearly, the main benefit of using those microprocessors is that you get to
say that you are "dropping Atom bombs."

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cvos
So now HN is trying to be PRweb?

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gfodor
I have to say this was one of the worst/most confusing analogies I've read in
a tech article:

"But those customers got tired of using the computing equivalent of a space
shuttle to go shopping at the grocery store."

Uhh, doesn't the space shuttle run 386's?

~~~
reeses
I was going to be snarky and ask,"Do you use a 386 to go shopping at the
grocery store?" but then realized I use an Apple A4/Cortex-A8 to go shopping
at the grocery store. (Never mind whatever is embedded in my car.)

I think I'm going to steal that analogy anyway, because I love baffling
metaphors. The nice thing would be using the Canadarm to put things in your
cart, especially heavy items such as cat litter and gallons of milk.

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jacques_chester
I think I'll wait for someone like Jon Stokes to talk about SeaMicro before
getting too excited about how 64-bit processors mean you can address 4Gb of
RAM.

~~~
justincormack
Yeah especially as the Atom N550 which has been out for a while has 64 bit
support.

Any article that calls a cpu a brain has no place on hacker news.

Only seems to be 2Gb RAM support too, single channel, non ECC. And Atom is
very slow...

~~~
peterb
CPU speed doesn't concern me, as memory access/front-side bus tends to be the
bottleneck in the applications I'm interested in. But non-EEC is a problem.
Intel intentionally crippled Atom to not cannibalize its server business. I
think a similar platform but with Arm Cortex-A15 would be even more
interesting.

RAM is the new disk.

~~~
reeses
And the new disk is RAM. Whoa, you just baked my brain.

------
wmf
There are some interesting technical details (including an answer to the ECC
question) in the Stanford EE380 video: [http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-
bin/videologger.php?target=100...](http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-
bin/videologger.php?target=100922-ee380-300.asx)

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reeses
My brain had a hash collision with SEAForth and thought that it would be
exceedingly unlikely to get much traction if they're expecting people to
program enterprise software in Forth.

Not that it wouldn't be...fun?

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JoachimSchipper
Reading between the lines: does this thing have the same issues with I/O that
virtual machines tend to have? (That doesn't make it useless, of course...)

~~~
pyre
Here's the original article on VentureBeat:
[http://venturebeat.com/2010/06/13/seamicro-drops-an-atom-
bom...](http://venturebeat.com/2010/06/13/seamicro-drops-an-atom-bomb-on-the-
server-industry/)

A few points:

* Interestingly, they use the same image at the beginning of that article and this one. They also seemed to re-use a lot of the original article text in this one.

* Most people were quick to point out that Intel's Atom processors don't support ECC RAM, and at the scale we're talking about here, RAM errors statistically will be common.

* From the article:
    
    
      Full told, SeaMicro eliminates 90 percent of the
      components from a system board. SeaMicro calls this
      CPU/IO virtualization. 
    

The HN Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1429628>

What seems to be the original announcement (HN submission 2 months before
original VentureBeat article): [http://gigaom.com/2010/01/06/seamicros-secret-
server-changes...](http://gigaom.com/2010/01/06/seamicros-secret-server-
changes-computing-economics/)

HN Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070705>

{edit} The gigaom article was 4 months before the original VentureBeat one (8
months ago vs 1 year ago). For some reason I was doing the date math in my
head in base10 (i.e. 1 year = 10 months). Maybe it's time for bed.

~~~
lemming
Here's some discussion on SeaMicro's original cluster-in-a-box offering from
the ever-excellent James Hamilton:
[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleases...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleasesInnovativeIntelAtomServer.aspx)

Lack of ECC support will be the killer here, I think - it would be great to
see an ARM based alternative.

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jacques_chester
I still miss SiCortex. Now _those_ were cool low-power supercomputers.

