Intel Corp. plans to offer three flavours of Atom S1200-series "Centerton" central processing units (CPUs) for micro-servers later this year with power consumption ranging from 6.1W to 8.5W. The chips and machines on their base will be available in the fourth quarter of the year and will be Intel's first attempt to enter the market of ultra low-voltage micro-servers, which will be gaining popularity in the coming years.

Intel Atom "Centerton" microprocessors have two 64-bit "Saltwell" x86 cores with Hyper-Threading technology, dedicated 32KB instruction and 24 KB data L1 caches as well as 512 KB L2 cache. The chips will feature single-channel DDR3 memory controller (up to 1333MHz, up to 8GB) with ECC, PCI Express 2.0 x controller, VT-x virtualization and some I/O components, reports CPU World web-site. Atom for servers are going to include a number of core and package low power states, from C1/C1E to C6, as well as Enhanced SpeedStep technology.

The Atom "Centerton" microprocessors for servers will be available separately and in "Double Cove" micro modules, which will employ two chips, memory, SATA/USB/Ethernet controllers, and will simplify development of ultra-dense servers.

It is expected that Hewlett-Packard and Quanta QCT will offer micro-servers based on Intel Atom "Centerton" processors by the end of the year. Eventually, such machines will be competing against ARM-based microservers, which are due in 2013 - 2014 timeframe.

^{Traditional server (left) vs. HP project Moonshot micro-server concept (right)}

Intel Atom "Centerton" CPUs will be available in the following configurations:

• Atom S1220 - dual-core with Hyper-Threading, 1.60GHz maximum clock-speed, 1MB L2 cache, 8.1W thermal design power
• Atom S1240 - dual-core with Hyper-Threading, 1.60GHz maximum clock-speed, 1MB L2 cache, 6.1W thermal design power
• Atom S1260 - dual-core with Hyper-Threading, 2.0GHz maximum clock-speed, 1MB L2 cache, 8.5W thermal design power

Tags: Centerton, Intel, Atom, Xeon, HP, Moonshot, Quanta