IDG News Service – Intel will not position its Atom processor for the server market, even as some vendors are building servers around collections of hundreds of low-power Atom processors, a company executive said.

A server that integrates 512 Atom processors with Ethernet switching, server management and application load-balancing was demonstrated earlier this month at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco by SeaMicro, a vendor of low-power server technology.

The SeaMicro server, and some new servers that use low-power chips based on ARM processors, will address only very niche markets, Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s vice president and general manager of its Data Center Group, said on Thursday.

“We are not opposed to an Atom based server, but we just don’t see broad adoption of the Atom as a server chip,” he said.

ARM processors have the added disadvantage of not being compatible with software written for the x86 architecture, Skaugen said.

He pointed to a recent article, “Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time” by Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations and Google Fellow at Google, which said that even though many Internet services benefit from seemingly unbounded request and data-level parallelism, as the number of parallel threads increases, reducing serialization and communication overheads can become increasingly difficult.

At some point you are so highly parallelized that you start doing artificial things in programming, that become unnatural, Skaugen said.

People want energy-efficient, raw performance, and that can be found in a Xeon box, and not in a server built around Atom processors, he added.

Intel demonstrated at IDF its next generation Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, which has eight cores which are each symmetric multi-threaded. “So in a two-socket system you will have 32 threads, which is cooler than putting 32 single-core Atom chips,” Skaugen said.

Intel also announced at IDF new processors targeted for servers.

Security technology from Intel’s proposed acquisition of McAfee will also go into server chips, though Skaugen declined to go into details. By coupling hardware and McAfee software in the chip, Intel hopes to shift the focus in security from recognizing and detecting historical threat signatures, to preventing unknown, “zero-day” security attacks by proactively identifying an issue, he said.

Wireless technology from the proposed acquisition of Infineon’s wireless business is less likely to go into Intel’s server products, as these technologies tend to be more relevant on the client side, Skaugen said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — You would think an x86 core would be a pretty hot item for a system-on-chip design. So why is no one biting on Intel Corp.’s offer last March to sell rights to an Atom core for SoCs made at TSMC?
Here’s some armchair speculation. Most of it comes down to one thing—this new SoC model might have some inside Intel a little scared.

1) Intel is charging high royalties

Intel did not make terms of its Atom SoC business publically available when it launched the deal. It’s a new business model for Intel and maybe the processor giant is being a little too greedy—aka fearful—about releasing the crown jewels of its processor designs.

2) Intel has some other nasty business terms

Atom royalties could be in line. After all, the prices ARM charges are probably widely known, so Intel should have a model on which to base its prices.

But I would not be surprised if Intel has a real fear about losing control of its intellectual property. Unlike ARM, Intel has spent years and millions litigating against rivals such as AMD, Cyrix and others who cloned the x86. The processor giant can’t afford to let China Inc. get hold of any proprietary details about its designs.

Thus I suspect there could be some onerous business or legal handcuffs that come with being an Atom licensee. If so, Intel could be scaring off customers.

3) Intel is not providing adequate visibility into its core

Again, fear of having one of its novel x86 designs cloned by rivals may have motivated Intel to keep a tight rein on how much technical detail it discloses about the core. SoC designers won’t want to trust their chip design to a core that isn’t well documented—especially not when there are plenty of alternative cores from ARM, MIPS and others that provide plenty of technical details about their internal plumbing.

4) The design might be a dog

Intel has disclosed no details about the Atom core it is making available through TSMC. Maybe it is some sort of step-child of the Atom cores Intel itself markets. The theory that Intel fears making its best IP openly available comes into play here, too.

The TSMC core could suck too much power. Even Intel’s Atom cores are power hogs compared to ARM cores in the same general neighborhood of performance, demanding a Watt or two where ARM might use a couple hundred milliwatts.

There could also be performance problems. Intel is gifted at cranking out processor designs when it owns the process technology they are made in. It is less skilled in designing for someone else’s standard foundry process—and it likely does not have its best design engineers on the task.

5) No one wants to go first

If I just got my $15 million in VC or corporate funding to do a new SoC design, I may not want to risk blowing the money on a brand new core just ported to a new process technology, provided by a large and paranoid company for whom the IP business is a new experiment.

No, I think I’d prefer a proven core and process and a core provider who has been in the game awhile.

6) Intel doesn’t know how to sell processor cores

Perhaps the PC processor giant just doesn’t know how to sell this stuff? The simple fix would be to hire a handful of enterprising ARM sales and application engineers.

Whatever the problems really are, I suspect they can be solved—if Intel really wants to be in this business. The x86 has a long history in PC and embedded markets. There are bazillions of apps, tools and peripherals for it.

Such a rich eco-system should attract a lively SoC business, if Intel has the will to do what it needs to do to become a solid silicon IP provider. Time will tell if that’s really in Intel’s soul, or the company just can’t get beyond its PC processor DNA.

Intel is set to announce the biggest makeover for its Atom processor since it was introduced back in the spring of 2008. And PC makers are ready with new Netbook models, some due before the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show in January.

HP has stopped selling preconfigured Mini 5101 Netbook models directly as it readies models with the new Atom processor.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard) Netbooks–tiny laptops used for Web surfing and light production tasks–have gained in popularity as a cheap alternative to a laptop. They can be had for as little as $250–or under $100 when bought as part of a two-year contract at phone carriers such as a Verizon.

Inside new Netbooks will beat Intel’s latest “Pine Trail” Atom processor. This watershed design will squeeze the graphics function–previously on a separate chip–into the central processing unit, or CPU, a first for Intel. And what does that mean to consumers? “Better battery life. But performance more than anything,” Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney said in a recent CNET interview.

Evidence of a rejiggered Netbook lineup can already seen at Hewlett-Packard, which has stopped selling preconfigured models of its well-received Mini 5101 directly from the HP Web site in preparation for new models to come, according to the company.

And Dell is on board too. “You can expect that Dell will be offering products based on Intel’s next-gen Atom platform, aka Pine Trail,” said a Dell spokesperson Monday. All major vendors currently offering Netbooks–such as Acer, Asus, Toshiba, and MSI–are also expected to refresh their lineups.

Intel, which is already on the record saying that the Pine Trail Atom is shipping this quarter, has made integration one its biggest themes in 2010 and beyond. Its Arrandale Core i series of processors for mainstream laptops, due by early next year, will also combine the graphics chip (GPU) with the CPU. And future generations of the Atom processor will be even more highly integrated.

One of the first new Pine Trail Atom processors expected to appear is a 1.66GHz version (rumored to be dubbed the N450). After this, a faster 1.83GHz version, the N470, is due.