Intel Atom S1200 Series Centerton

[Patrick]

Quick live blog of the new server oriented Intel Atom S1200 series launch event. The Intel Atom Centerton was announced this summer and is now launched.

Key Points from the presentation:
6w SoC for datacenters
>20 Atom Design wins
Micro server storage and communications

Consistency in the data center lowers cost of maintenance and that is something the Intel Atom S1200 is concentrated on.
Amazon only has 7 unique instances in the data center including a Xeon E5 deployment that was #42 on the SC 500 launch.

Example design wins:
Dedicated web hosting
L2 network switching
Low-end storage

Microserver Timeline
Intel Xeon 2009 Concept -> 2010 2 Commercial systems -> 2011 5 Commercial Systems -> 2012 6 Commercial systems
Atom launched in the 2010-2011 timeline, first dedicated product (Atom S1200 line) today.

Intel Atom S1200 Details
6w TDP
2 Core + Hyper Threading
ECC Memory
Intel Virtualization Technology
High-density 1000+ nodes per rack

Estimated Intel CPU Revenue per rack
Intel Xeon E3 low power: $32.9K USD 2x Web transactions / rack
Intel Atom S1200 $35.8K USD - 5x more nodes/ rack
*Based on 560 atom cores per rack and ~110 Intel Xeon cores/ rack

Most suitable for light Scale-Out applications
Simple content delivery
Large distributed memory caching
Big-data simple search systems
MapReduce applications

Performance per watt:
Compute intensive performance per watt favors an Intel Xeon E3-1265L by about 2x
Light Scale-Out Applications favor the Intel Atom S1200 2.0ghz

Hyper scale update
Next generation HP Moonshot Gemini product Q1 2013.

Process
Next gen will be 22nm, following will be 14nm.

Facebook
140+ billion friend connections
220+ billion photos
300+ million photos added per day
Intel Xeon processors are used to scale photos
Intel Atom S1200 processors could be used for the storage tier
4.5 billion likes, posts, comments and photos added per day

Cost
As low as $54 in 1000 quantity

Avoton will integrate network fabric into SoC at 22nm.
14nm product is that there will be an "exciting" and "very cool" announcement
Looking forward to a 1 year new product release cadence

Also posted a quick Intel Atom S1200 Centerton for servers piece while at the launch event.

 

[MiniKnight]

Rad

Other than HP and Facebook any other vendors showing product? Were Synology, Thecus and them all there?

 

[Patrick]

Update with the press release from Intel:

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 11, 2012 – Intel Corporation introduced the Intel® Atom™ processor S1200 product family today, delivering the world's first low-power, 64-bit server-class system-on-chip (SoC) for high-density microservers, as well as a new class of energy-efficient storage and networking systems. The energy-sipping, industrial-strength microprocessor features essential capabilities to achieve server-class reliability, manageability and cost effectiveness.


"The data center continues to evolve into unique segments and Intel continues to be a leader in these transitions," said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel. "We recognized several years ago the need for a new breed of high-density, energy-efficient servers and other datacenter equipment. Today, we are delivering the industry's only 6-watt[SUP]1[/SUP] SoC that has key datacenter features, continuing our commitment to help lead these segments."

Intel's Next Generation of Microservers: The Real Thing
As public clouds continue to grow, the opportunity to transform companies providing dedicated hosting, content delivery or front-end Web servers are also growing. High density servers based on low-power processors are able to deliver the desired performance while at the same time significantly reduce the energy consumption – one of the biggest cost drivers in the data center. However, before deploying new equipment in data centers, companies look for several critical features.

The Intel Atom processor S1200 product family is the first low-power SoC delivering required data center features that ensure server-class levels of reliability and manageability while also enabling significant savings in overall costs. The SoC includes two physical cores and a total of four threads enabled with Intel[SUP]®[/SUP] Hyper-Threading Technology[SUP]2[/SUP] (Intel® HT). The SoC also includes 64-bit support, a memory controller supporting up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, Intel® Virtualization Technologies (Intel® VT), eight lanes of PCI Express 2.0, Error-Correcting Code (ECC) support for higher reliability, and other I/O interfaces integrated from Intel chipsets. The new product family will consist of three processors with frequency ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.0GHz.

The Intel Atom S1200 product family is also compatible with the x86 software that is commonly used in data centers today. This enables easy integration of the new low-powered equipment and avoids additional investments in porting and maintaining new software stacks.

New Milestones in Power Efficiency
Intel continues to drive power consumption down in its products, enabling systems to be as energy efficient as possible. Each year since the 2006 introduction of low-power Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel has delivered a new generation of low-power processors that have decreased the thermal design power (TDP) from 40 watts in 2006 to 17 watts this year due to Intel's advanced 22-nanometer (nm) process technology. The Intel Atom processor S1200 product family is the first low-power SoC with server-class features offering as low as 6 watts[SUP]1[/SUP] of TDP.

Broad Industry Support
Today, more than 20 low-power designs including microservers, storage and networking systems use the Intel Atom processor S1200 processor family from companies including Accusys*, CETC*, Dell*, HP*, Huawei*, Inspur*, Microsan*, Qsan*, Quanta*, Supermicro* and Wiwynn*.

"Organizations supporting hyperscale workloads need powerful servers to maximize efficiency and realize radical space, cost and energy savings," said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager, Hyperscale Business Unit, Industry-standard Servers and Software at HP. "HP servers power many of those organizations, and the Intel Atom processor S1200 will be instrumental as we develop the next wave of application-defined computing to dramatically reduce cost and energy use for our customers."

An Even Brighter Future
Intel is working on the next generation of Intel Atom processors for extreme energy efficiency codenamed "Avoton." Available in 2013, Avoton will further extend Intel's SoC capabilities and use the company's leading 3-D Tri-gate 22 nm transistors, delivering world-class power consumption and performance levels.

For customers interested in low-voltage Intel® Xeon® processor models for low-power servers, storage and networking, Intel will introduce the new Intel Xeon processor E3 v3 product family based on the "Haswell" microarchitecture next year. These new processors will take advantage of new energy-saving features in Haswell and provide balanced performance-per-watt, giving customers even more options.

Pricing and Availability
The Intel Atom processor S1200 is shipping today to customers with recommended customer price starting at $54 in quantities of 1,000 units.

 

[OBasel]

How do these compare to the current Atom or the big 3 cloud --- Amazon, HP, Microsoft?

 

[Mike]

I would be pretty interested in a comparison in efficiency based on a certain workload.

 

[RimBlock]

With VT-x, ECC ram support and PCIe 2.0 x8 lanes they could be an interesting addition to the micro server market and for low power, simple virtualisation platforms if Intel do not hobble them like they did with the removal of VT-d on the mITX S1200KP board via BIOS firmware.

I am sure a number of solution providers like myself are eagerly awaiting price for final products (Atom S boards with processors) with interest.

RB

 

[dealcorn]

Duplicate post.

 

[dealcorn]

Was there any hint regarding availability of motherboards for the DIY market? I see home S1240 use as a robust firewall/router, various network servers, P2P daemon host, with light file server/streaming duties.

Is it too early to issue a "Possible Incoming Hottie Alert" for Briarwood which is the next quarter Centerton product? It sound like they built competant hardware assist for parity checking into the SOC. With correct drivers, parity checking in software RAID 6 or Raid-Z 3 requires no CPU cycles. Translated, that means your cheapest EBay sourced hba adapter should provide RAID 6 performance similar to that of an expensive hardware assisted RAID card. Conceptually, this should work with ZFS which is not receptive to hardware assisted RAID. Assuming the driver side was sorted out when Intel included the Cystal DMA engine component in some prior Xeon, this may be good to go on release. It supports enough PCI-e lanes to handle 3 hba's. Will RAID-Z 3 on Atom become attractive? For that functionality, pricing looks reasonable. I am going to keep my eye on this one as she comes in.

 

[xnoodle]

Supermicro has some info up.
5017A-EF seems to be the successor to their Atom solutions. Motherboard is X9SBAA-F, with 1 DDR3 dimm slot (8gb max).

I wonder how they stack up to the mobile Core based offerings (QM77 chipset).

 

[Jeggs101]

I wonder if they just put those up? Anyone seen DDR3 ECC SODIMMS?

 

[cactus]

I saw a few on the Kingston site when looking if ECC existed for the QM77 1u Supermicros.

 

[Patrick]

Was going through my pictures from the launch event this week. Here is a Supermicro X9SBAA-F in the wild:

 

[dba]

Was going through my pictures from the launch event this week. Here is a Supermicro X9SBAA-F in the wild:...

That little Supermicro looks like it would make a great home automation server!

 

[RimBlock]

Hmm,

PCIe x8 available and it has a PCI slot. Whilst I do appreciate they have 3 network ports (presumably using 3x PCIe x1 lanes) it is a shame they could not queeze a PCIe x4 in an x8 or x16 mechanical slot. Really need to see the tech manual to work out where all the other lanes have been used but being able to add a PCIe sas controller (even running at half speed) or a multi port nic would have been very helpful to a lot of people.

The newer i5 / i7 X9SPV integrated Supermicro boards are just crazy expensive (around US$1,000 IIRC). Hopefully Supermicro will not price these out of reach of many.

RB

 

[cactus]

S1240 has 8 PCI-E V2 lanes.
1-4x to Intel i350-AM2 (The i350-T2 is a 4x card, but with PCI-E 2.1 only 1 lane for dual ports at full GbE speed)
1x(using 2x because of SoC limitation) to Renesas uPD720201
2x to Marvell 88SE9230
2x to a PCI-E to PCI bridge (I cant find a picture that shows the ICs on the board well)
So that leaves 0 or 2x left depending on how the i350-AM2 is connected and if there is a PCI-E to PCI bridge.

Looks like the Realtek RTL8201F is connected to the Nuvoton WPCM450 BMC using (R)MII. Also, looks like the BMC chip is connected to the Intel using NC-SI.

It is interesting to note that the Intel SoC has no native SATA or Ethernet MAC.

 

[RimBlock]

This board looks like an upgraded D2500CC which is great for routers and the like. Maybe the S1240 will make it a more viable entry level domain Controller.

My D2700MUD will run WHS 2011 but install and patching is painfully slow.

RB

 

[MiniKnight]

It is interesting to note that the Intel SoC has no native SATA or Ethernet MAC.

Looks like all the ARM manufacturers are pointing this out. They are saying Intel platform is not a fully integrated SoC.

 

[RimBlock]

Have just got pricing on the Supermicro X9SBAA-F. The price is not so bad.

The question on my mind is whether it is low enough under the price of a Intel S1200KP and E3-1220L v2 combination. Pricing difference is around US$75 where I am with the Atom being the cheaper.

Kingston have some memory listed for it now here. May need to check out the pricing.

It will be interesting to see how the board handles virtualisation.

RB

 

[sboesch]

$76 a piece for an 8 GB ECC SODIMM is not bad.

 

[bp_968]

I expect it will be cheaper then a small 1155 build but I wonder, since many of us essentially run our builds at idle the vast majority of the time, will it actually give us a much lower power draw over a E3 Xeon?

I have been piecing together a storage server and trying to save power where I can and decided I didn't need to much CPU but it did need ECC. I ordered a E3-1220L and now think it wasn't the best idea. Its a 4u case (huge) so airflow is a non issue and it will be idle most of the time. A E3-1220 (nonL) would have been near the same idle power but with much more overhead. Guess I can always sell it later if I end up needing more grunt or use it in a tiny build where the 20w TDP would be quite useful.