Based on what Intel disclosed today, here’s a snapshot of Calxeda EnergyCore 1000 vs. Intel’s new S1200 chip:
| ECX1000 | Intel S1200 | |
| Watts | 3.8 | 6.1 |
| Cores | 4 | 2 |
| Cache (MB) | 4 Shared | 2 x .5 MB |
| PCI-E | 16 lanes | 8 lanes |
| ECC | Yes | Yes |
| SATA | Yes | No |
| Ethernet | Yes | No |
| Management | Yes | No |
| OOO Execution | Yes | No |
| Fabric Switch | 80 Gb | NA |
| Fabric ports | 5 | NA |
| Address Size | 32 bits | 64 bits |
| Memory Size | 4 GB | 8 GB |
So, while the Centerton announcement indicates that Intel takes “microservers” seriously after all, it falls short of the ARM competition. It DOES have 64-bits and Intel ISA compatibility, however. Most workloads targeting ARM are interpreted code (PHP, LAMP, Java, etc), so this is not as big a deal as some would have you believe!Intel did not specify the additional chips required to deliver a real “Server Class” solution like Calxeda’s, but our analysis indicates this could add 10 additional watts PLUS the cost. That would imply the real comparison is between ECX and S1200 is ~3.8 vs ~16 watts. So roughly 3-4 times more power for Intel’s new S1200, again, comparing 2 cores to 4. Internal Calxeda benchmarks indicate that Calxeda’s four cores and larger cache delivery 50% more performance compared to the 2 hyper-threaded Atom cores. This translates to a Calxeda advantage of 4.5 to 6 times better performance per watt, depending on the nature of the application.
