Intel releases new 'smartphone class' server chip

A 64-bit Atom chip designed for special types of workloads, while the world waits for 64-bit ARM

It's clear that Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook, didn't study marketing in school. At a press event Tuesday announcing Intel's new low-power Atom processor, he described the chip as "wimpy" in comparison to Xeon-class chips, which he called "brawny." But he meant it in a good way.

The most influential smartphones

Intel released a 64-bit, 32nm dual-core Atom processor, the S1200. The 6W chip is designed for the emerging microserver market. Microservers are being designed to handle tasks that aren't necessarily compute-intensive, like serving up billions of photos, as Facebook does.

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"We will not hold back performance in any one of our product lines," said Bryant, during the press briefing. "We will put more cores down" and integrate other capabilities into the chip, she said.

Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov, or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His email address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

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