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Yesterday Intel announced the Atom D425 and D525 platforms targeted for small storage servers. Both chips are 1.8GHz parts with Hyper-Threading. The Atom D425 is a single core with 512KB of cache (10w TDP) and the Atom D525 (13w TDP) being the dual core chip with 1MB of L2 cache.

The chips support both the DDR2 like the Atom D410 and Atom D510 did, but also support DDR3 SODIMMs. Generally speaking, DDR3 SODIMMs use slightly less power than their DDR2 variants. The TDP of the new chips is identical to the older D410 and D510 chips rated at 1.66GHz. Read the full story

As one would gather from my previous Intel Atom D510 and NM10 post, I am not the biggest fan of the current D510 Atom platform with NM10 chipset. ZOTAC, to its credit, did take a rather mediocre platform and build a solid board around it. The most probable use case is a streaming media HTPC (non h.264) to a legacy 720p display. The nice thing about the ZOTAC offering is that it has quite a few expansion options for a D510/ NM10 based system, and it is ready to go out of the box. Unlike other Intel and AMD platforms, the Atom D510 and accompanying heatsink do not need to be installed by the user. One can literally plug in a display, mouse, keyboard, RAM, storage drive(s), and 20-pin power source and start using the system. As a preview, my end conclusion is that the ZOTAC board is a great choice given the platform, but the Intel platform leaves a lot to be desired. Read the full story

As many have saw, Intel Corporation unvieled its new Atom platform for small business and home storage/ NAS products at CeBIT. It seems like this is not a Windows Home Server V2 (WHS V2) or Vail solution.
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Intel’s Clarkdale and H55/ H57 platforms are quite intriguing for several reasons. First, the performance is fairly good starting at 2.93ghz, and with hyperthreading, it is possible to get closer to a quad core performance in some tasks where multiple cores do well, such as video encoding. A second aspect is that Intel moved the IGP to an on package solution and really cut the power consumption/ heat dissipation of the platform. Finally, the cost of an i3-530 or i5-650 CPU plus a motherboard is often in the $200 or less range, making them quite affordable.

Two great uses for the chips are home servers and HTPC’s. Low power consumption and low heat generation ultimately enable lower acoustic signatures, as well as lower TCO through lower electric draw.

Core i5-650, Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Dual Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI NICs

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