Intel Seeks Big Slice of Microservers

Zewde Yeraswork
EETimes (12/20/2013 09:48 AM EST)

NEW YORK — Chipmaker Intel is looking to become the market leader in the burgeoning microserver segment that has become very prominent thanks to cloud computing and Internet services. However, as the company pushes its Xeon and Atom based offerings, analysts see chinks in its armor that a handful of ARM-based SOCs will look to exploit in 2014.

Raejeanne Skillern, director of cloud marketing at Intel, said in an interview with EE Times that Intel actually defined the category back in 2009 and maintains a consistent definition of microservers, which hit has used publicly. That definition is “low-power, one-socket scale-out shared architecture” typically involving certain chassis and certain power levels, as well as fans and cooling.

“I started defining the segment in 2009 when I proposed the name 'microserver' for the segment,” Skillern said. “One of the things we offer in this segment is the agility to move between Xeon and Atom within the product line. We believe stepping into 2014 that we have a leadership roadmap that spans all the segments.”

Skillern pointed to the rack scale architecture that Intel has been designing and said that the designs Intel has been driving bring the next level of modularity and flexibility as well as power-savings and density improvements with higher I/O speeds.

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