Dell said to tap Via Nano for servers

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Dell will reportedly use Via Technologies chips in select low-power servers.

According to The New York Times' Ashlee Vance, Dell will unveil a system that has 12 full servers running on Via's Nano chip. Each server will consumer 15 watts of power.

Dell is expected to unveil the Via-powered systems next week.

For Via, Dell would be a huge win. Via is a player in the Netbook market, but Intel and AMD own the server market. Dell will pitch these servers to Web-hosting companies. However, don't expect much in the way of performance.

Vance writes:

Running at just 1.3GHz or 1.6GHz, the Via chips sit very low on the performance totem pole when it comes to server chips. But it's the chip's lower speed and other architecture tweaks helps it keep power consumption and costs low. For example, the new Dell servers cost less than $400 a pop, which is just a fraction of the cost of a typical server.

AMD and Intel are likely to scoff at such performance, but for Via, Dell is a big win that may lead to more customers.

For the first quarter, IDC reports that Via had a market share of 0.4 percent compared to Intel and AMD's 77.3 percent and 22.3 percent, respectively. In the mobile market, Via had market share of 0.7 percent.

[monkeyfun14]

=P I wouldn't even put a via in my file server.

[slickuser]

Bad news for Arab Micro Devices...

[tehrani625]

I gave up some of mah oil $$ for them...

Tehrani means person from Tehran the capital of Iran, in case ur wondering:P

[John-D]

It seems to me, especially with servers, that power consumption and cost are far less important to potential users than reliability; compatibly; performance; and virtualization support.

I wish Dell well on their decision to use Via.

[ITcomposer]

Perhaps we need to be reminded that AMD purchased ATI some time ago and that it just became a chip design house like NVIDIA, so i personally believe that once AMD gets its head out of its ass about MOBILE CPUs that they'll finally start taking back the market share that belons to them.
Furthermore they need to compete with better chips on the server space which right now they are getting creamed by INTEL.

Btw, to answer mr.tehrani, iran doesnt own a single share of AMD, the goverment of Abudh dubai does, you know, that little country with the funky man made islands?
When it comes to VIA, um, well im surprised they still existed i would have thought they were folded into some other company, its good to see that its still a 3 horse race.

[pithenumber]

Opty's are still popular server chips, the Istanbul's will just make Opty's even better server chips
the Nehalem Xeons belong in workstations, not servers in my point of view

I do agree that AMD sucks in mobile space though

[cp256]

Have fun running PHP5 bloatware like Joomla with databases like MySQL on even a moderately loaded Nano box. I don't want to even think about porky ****** like M$ OSes. What a waste of time. VIA should concentrate on making their chipsets work better.

[zyxxy]

The Nano significantly outperforms the ATOM. For load balanced HTML server farms, the Nano might work just fine, particularly in terms of 'pages per watt'. A huge CPU that is IO bound is worthless against a sea of lesser processors with distributed IO, if it is not constrained by single threaded computationally intensive tasks. You need to understand your problem domain before you pick your server, and for some uses, I think this may fit the bill. If you see the total energy cost, power and cooling, for some of these server farms, you would understand the desire to build power efficient server blades.

With some of the progress made recently in ARM based cores from TI and Marvell, I think it is just a matter of time before you see an ARM based server farm. If you are just running integer operations and IO, the x86 architecture is not that big an advantage. Cycles per watt, it is hard to beat ARM.