- verifiedNew "atomic" server: 512 Atom CPUs take on Xeons
So while the front side of the ASIC attaches to the Atom chipset via PCIe, the backside of it attaches to a heinous-bandwidth, proprietary bus that connects the invidual server nodes to each other and to a shared lake of storage and network interfaces. The ASIC does a bit of sleight-of-together for the Atom node that it's joined to, making it appear as if the OS as it happens that's running on that node is soon looking at and talking to the storage and networking controllers; in genuineness, those controllers are being shared by all of the Atom nodes in the system.
In other words, the ASIC implements a lenient of I/O virtualization in hardware.
By removing all of the storage and I/O controller arms from each server node in proclamation to centralize it in one place in the system, and by leaving a cull ASIC at the node as the tolerant of ghost or avatar for that (now centrally located) controller computer equipment, the SM10K dramatically reduces the evaluate of each individual server node. The incarnation below shows a single trustees that packs eight server nodes in a 5" x 11" extent.
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