The pillars of the micro-server market

In the US time of Wednesday, AMD announced acquisitions of vendors focused on Low-power servers Seamicro.

"Seamicro owns the technology and we have a market relationship," says John Fruehe, director of AMD product marketing. What the cloud market is looking for is this low-power micro-server. ”

As an emerging start-up in Silicon Valley, Seamicro is definitely a rookie in the server market, but with its advanced product architecture and ultra-low power consumption, Seamicro quickly gets orders from a number of heavyweight customers, including Skype, France Telecom, Mozilla, EHarmony (focus on the European and American market Marriage Service website) and other companies. These typical internet companies are obviously looking at the Seamicro company's micro-server products in energy consumption, space occupancy and other core indicators on the advantages of traditional servers. According to Seamicro current product specifications, its main model SM10000-64HD can be in a standard 10U rack-structured content of the 768 processor core, the internal communication bus bandwidth reaches 1.28TB. Such weak nodes, high-bandwidth structures are naturally consistent with the fast-evolving Hadoop distributed computing structure, and this is the product that can be welcomed by many internet companies. It is reported that this product is Hadoop's third generation of micro-server products. According to the actual test, under the same computing power, the Seamicro solution consumes only one-fourth of the average server, and only one-sixth of the space. It's a huge attraction for internet companies that need a lot of servers.

In the financial sector, the newly established Seamicro company has also reaped considerable gains. According to the information currently available, prior to the acquisition of AMD, Seamicro had received Crosslink Capital, Khosla venture capital and DFJ and other VC companies more than 60 million U.S. dollars in financial support, and then received the U.S. Department of Energy's 9.3 million U.S. dollar funding support, The funds are the largest part of the U.S. Department of Energy's $47 million trillion in financial support for the Energy Efficiency Improvement Program for 14 data centers. A large amount of financial support is also the main reason why Seamicro has launched three generations of products in a short period of one year.

And this AMD buys Seamicro's action purposeful also very strong. From a strategic point of view, AMD's APU although has achieved a decent record in 2011, but its development should not be limited to the mobile field. On the other hand, in the enterprise market, AMD's market share and Intel is not at all an order of magnitude, just six months of AMD CEO Lori's urgent need in the enterprise-level market to find a AMD do not have to spend too much resources to be able to gain the breakthrough. And the rise of the micro-server is such a rare opportunity.

Looking at the current micro-server market, can actually take out the product of the three, the first is Seamicro, and also focus on the ARM architecture micro-server Calxeda, and finally is the rich and the HP.

The acquisition of HP's arm architecture is clearly not what AMD can do, the ARM architecture micro-server as its strategic development direction, this product line is clearly not want to buy can be bought. and focus on Calxeda is obviously not the best choice for AMD; First, AMD does not have its own ARM architecture processor design experience; second, the success of the arm into the server market is not yet known, the risk is too big. Finally, in front of AMD is only Seamicro.

Prior to Seamicro, the Atom core processor was used, and since Atom did not support 64bit addressing and instruction sets before, Seamicro was using the special edition Atom dual-core processor supplied by Intel. AMD after the acquisition of Seamicro obviously do not have to face these problems, first of all, Apu can provide complete 64bit capability, and Apu obviously in the power consumption is not much worse than atom, not to mention this is in the case of a strong graphics built-in. It can be speculated that after removing the integrated video card from APU, the AMD Micro server is likely to have stronger performance and power performance. and the dual core and four core APU product line also clearly can bring the customer a richer choice.

In the next five years, the market demand for a micro-server (cloud server) is likely to reach more than 10% of the entire server market, according to forecasts from previous investigators. And that's exactly what AMD, Intel and ARM are doing to make the final technical dash for a big burst of low-power servers.

From the current point of view, Intel has certainly been working with Seamicro to gain considerable experience with Low-power server design. AMD as a new owner of Seamicro, obviously also can obtain the relevant ability. On the other side of the Low-power server, ARM is also gearing up. According to a spokesman for ARM's CeBIT in 2011, ARM will launch a new arm V8 microarchitecture in 2012-2013, which provides a complete 64bit addressing and instruction capability for ARM processors, and arm, by adding new instruction sets and making hardware optimizations, The V8 architecture also provides good hardware optimization and support for virtualization.

And from the competition analysis, the war is also quite interesting. Arm only does the architect research and authorization, through the completely open authorization to welcome any manufacturer to join the camp, the structure is loose, but the risk is quite small, this gives the partner the profit also to be more rich. Intel, however, only makes chipsets and CPUs, and is indirectly involved in competition through strong control of channels and partners. AMD will soon acquire relevant research and development experience through acquisition of Seamicro and eventually launch related products and solutions, so as to reduce the technical and financial threshold of the partners. It is conceivable that such a different style of competition will be unprecedented and unique. For the industry as a whole, "more choices, more laughter".

Microprocessor war, showing the potential of the Three Kingdoms War, you reader please polish your eyes, in the next year, the competition will be opened.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)