As reported in various outlets yesterday, Intel has released their S1200 line of Atom SOC’s targeting the microserver market with the tagline: “Intel Delivers the World’s First 6-Watt Server-Class Processor”. The first notable point here is that they had to use 6 Watts, because 5 was already taken. The second notable point is their definition of “Server-Class”. Looking at the list of features on the Atom S1200, there are key “Server-Class” features missing:
- Networking: Intel’s SOC requires you to add hardware for networking
- Storage: Once again, there is no SATA connectivity included on the Intel SOC, so you must add hardware for that
- Management: Even microservers need remote manageability features, so again with Intel you need to tack that on to the power and price budgets.
