

Hints of a New Market for Cheap, Power-Sipping Servers - mshafrir
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/05/25/hints-of-a-new-market-for-cheap-power-sipping-servers

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patio11
Interesting, but it seems to me that virtualization probably accomplishes all
the goals, cheaper.

Instead of getting 100% of a cheap sipping server, get 12.5% of one that has
economies of scale on manufacturing and operation. (You can use the other
87.5% for other projects. If you don't have enough projects to justify use of
one full commodity server, you don't care about this discussion anyhow, but
renting a VPS might work out for you.)

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lsc
Yeah, until these low-power computers improve a whole lot, I agree. I bought a
few of those atoms to try 'em out, you know, people will pay a good bit more
for their own dedicated server than they will for a VPS. Once you put it
together, the atom, with a limit of 2GiB ram, draws around 50 watts under
load. (I can only imagine most of that is power supply inefficiency and
chipset badness) one of my 8 core low-power dual-opterons eats about 4x as
much power, but I get 32GiB ram and many times the power of 4 puny atoms.

Until intel quits nerfing the atom (and maybe even then) virtualizing a big
server is going to get you a whole lot more power for a whole lot less fuss.

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lsc
the big problem here is Intel's nerfing of the atom by pairing it with a very
thirsty chipset. Note, you buy an atom board, the Atom CPU has a passive heat
sink; the chipset has an active fan.

I imagine this will change once Via gets a competitive chip in a server form
factor.

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mvbma
Get off the Intel bandwagon and go ARM.

