SeaMicro just announced their newest ultra-dense, ultra-low power Atom-based server solution. Our pal TPM gives it full coverage in this Reg article, but here’s the basic story:

Their first system, the SM10000, crammed eight Atom single-core processors and 16GB of memory onto a 5” x 11” system board and combined 64 of these boards along with switches, fans, and space for 64 drives into a single 10U chassis. All in, the system supports a grand total of 512 server images.

The new box, cleverly named the SM10000-64, is essentially the same thing, but with a significant upgrade at the server board level.

The new boards use the upcoming Atom N570, a dual-core chip that can support 64-bit operating systems. It can address 4GB of memory, and it has Intel’s VT-x support for virtualization. The total core count on the boards and in the entire system remains the same.

Each of the new dual-core Atoms replaces two of the older single-core chips and even leaves room for – as the company put it in a briefing – “future cool stuff.” I suggested they add extra user memory to store music and video files (i.e. porn), but that was met with silence.The biggest physical change is doubled memory from 2GB per server to 4GB and, of course, the ability to address it.

To me, it looks like SeaMicro is Intel’s weapon of choice to blunt the ARM processor’s move into servers. As has been chronicled in the Reg and elsewhere, NVIDIA (along with a host of smaller companies) is looking to morph the uber low-cost, low-power ARM chip into server processor form. With ARM, they have a chance to take a clean-sheet approach to building flavors that are server-centric.

Their advantage is that they don’t have any legacy compatibilities that they have to carry forward in their new chips; it’s the most rasa the tabula has been since perhaps the DEC Alpha chip. But the ARM guys have a bit easier sledding than the Alpha floggers.

Back in Alpha’s day, they had to fab their own chips, and the individual chip production costs were very high. Plus they had to adapt (or have others adapt) operating systems for it, and then convince ISVs to port applications.

With ARM, they already have Linux variants, and Microsoft has pledged support for the chips as well. There are also several different alternatives for chip fabbing, and current volumes for ARM chips far outstrip those of Intel and AMD combined on the x86 side of the market. How much those economies of scale come into play in keeping the per chip cost of Server ARM down is an open question, however.

What Intel and SeaMicro have going for them is a highly dense server solution that uses one-fourth the space and power of traditional servers for comparable throughput. The acquisition costs are roughly the same, but the operational costs should be about 75% less expensive.

They also have the massive x86 ecosystem – a huge advantage. ISVs and customers alike can run the exact same code on the new SM10000-64 as they would on their traditional x86 systems.

For web-centric customers, the highest operational expense is electricity, and the SeaMicro solution beats all other contenders by a huge margin on this basis; this is what has fueled their success so far. The new system, with its larger memory, support for 64-bit apps, and virtualization support, should bring even more into the fold.

It’s easy to see why Intel is showing a lot of interest in SeaMicro and showering them with support. SeaMicro is Intel’s best shot to get product into the market that can compete and win against ARM when it appears in server trim.