SeaMicro Launches an Atom-Powered Cloud Computing Server

“This secret sauce of the SM10000 is what allows the boards to
be so small. The company was able to remove things like the I/O
assembly, BIOS , the networking interface and hard disk
controllers. There are basically only three chips on a SM10000
card: the Atom CPU, DRAM, and the custom chip SeaMicro designed to
replace all the old processors.

“Feldman said the custom chip is not exclusive to the Atom and
could conceivably work with Intel’s Xeon processors. Intel (NASDAQ:
INTC) will have to license the technology, though; SeaMicro has
patents for its secret sauce.

With these multi-CPU cards, SeaMicro built a fabric to link
hundreds of the motherboards together inside the 10u chassis.
SeaMicro added gigabit switches, a load balancer and a terminal
balancer, all in hardware. The Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP software of
the popular LAMP stack used by Web servers that the SM10000 is
optimized around, will run unmodified on the SM10000, no recompile
needed. We are a LAMP stack crushing machine,’ boasted
Feldman.”

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