Free Market In Action: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

June 13, 2010 | Dean Takahashi
VentureBeat
Jun. 14, 2010

Coming out of stealth, SeaMicro is dispelling the Silicon Valley myth that you can’t innovate in hardware anymore. The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.

It sounds impossible. But if SeaMicro can deliver, then it will deal a big blow to server vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. And it could delight customers with big data centers that are consuming too much power and are having a hard time keeping up with the demand for free internet services.

The startup shows a lot of promise because it began 3.5 years ago by rethinking a lot of assumptions. Andrew Feldman, chief executive of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeaMicro, said in an interview that his team realized that there was a big mismatch between server chips and the workloads they were handling. As the task at hand shifted from doing one big chore at a time for a corporation to serving lots of web pages to millions of people, servers had to change too.

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