A couple of years ago, Dell looked equal parts laggard and self-defeating Intel loyalist when it ended up as the last big server maker to add popular chips from Advanced Micro Devices as options for customers. Now, a revamped Dell has shown flashes of creativity and an adventurous spirit by becoming the first hardware heavyweight to pop chips from the Taiwan manufacturer Via into its servers.
This week, Dell is revealing a rather original system design that places 12 full servers running on Via’s Nano chip in a case 3.5 inches, or about 9 centimeters, high. That’s three times as many servers as Dell usually squeezes into similar, compact systems. Equally important, each server will consume 15 watts to 30 watts, or about one-tenth the power of a standard server.
It’s beyond unusual to find the Via chips in a major-league server. The Nano product has mostly been aimed at cheaper computers like small laptops.
Beyond that, Intel and AMD have had the entire x86 server chip market to themselves for years. It seems they will now find some competition.
“This one is a big, major win for us,” Epan Wu, senior director of chip marketing at Via, said about the Dell system.
The crafty Dell design may buy some leeway for the company’s lack of marketing inspiration. The new server is called the XS11-VX8. As the bland name indicates, the product is not meant for mass consumption. Rather, it’s a specialized system aimed at companies that buy hundreds and even thousands of servers to host Web sites.
Running at just 1.3 gigahertz or 1.6 gigahertz, the Via chips sit very low on the performance totem pole when it comes to server chips. But the chips’ lower speed and other architecture tweaks help it to keep power consumption and costs low. For example, the new Dell…