Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on January 30, 2013 9:50 pm wrote:
> Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on January 30, 2013 3:51 pm wrote:
> > Unless we think that these customers need the RAS (including ECC), the relevant ASP might be
> > the Value Desktop chips at $57.92. I'm guessing that these are single socket, quad core, dual
> > memory channel chips. I'd expect the individual cores to be faster than current ARM cores, so
>
>
> Can you buy those value desktop chips on a server motherboard from anyone? Buyers aren't going
> to want to crowd a bunch of desktop towers into their racks, they want something like that to fit
> in a 1U rack in their datacenter with manageability functions they come to expect from server products.
> I mean, technically it is possible for someone to offer this as a server product, but is it this
> product available anywhere today or only a theoretical possibility?

Supermicro MicroCloud Solution - Up to 12 Modular UP Server Nodes in 3U:
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/MicroCloud.cfm

MicroCloud-compatible motherboards:
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCD_-F.cfm
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCD_-HF.cfm
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCD-F.cfm
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCE-F.cfm

All four motherboards support Socket 1155 Celerons.
However, I don't think that many MicroCloud users will pick Celeron over inexpensive core-i3.
Core-i3-3220T looks especially attractive due to 35W TDP and ECC support.

Now, i3-3220T looks better than Celeron, but from throughput-per-Watt point of view, even 3220T is probably far behind Xeon-E3-1265LV2, and from throughput-per-$ perspective it, likely, not better than Xeon-E3-1230V2.

IMHO, Celeron/Pentium/i3 based servers have their place in SOHO/SMB, but they are not really suited for density-concerned server rooms of the big organizations.

> Intel isn't encouraging that
> now, because they want to sell you server parts at a higher ASP and margin. The fact they COULD
> go lower indicates there is some slack in the market for ARM OEMs to try to exploit.
>
> Obviously Intel can make life much harder for them by encouraging those desktop parts to be marketed for servers,
> but that still damages Intel's profitability when compared to the current scenario where those potential $57
> ASP customers are forced to buy a $252 ASP product instead despite it being essentially the same thing.

$42 Celeron Processor G1610 and $215 Xeon-E3-1230V2 are the same thing only for SOHO/SMB shops that don't care about throughput.
Under heavy loads Xeon's 4x number of threads, 2x number of cores, 1.27x base frequency+Turbo Boost, 4x LLC size and support for AES-NI easily wins a day.