Intel ships new Atom processors for small biz, home storage appliances

Computerworld - Intel today introduced an update to its Atom processor-based platform for home and small business storage appliances.

The updated chip offers a performance boost and supports a new memory technology, Intel said.

The new 1.8GHz D425 (single core) and D525 (dual core) processors are paired with the Intel's 82801 IR I/O controller that delivers the connectivity. Both new processor platforms support Microsoft Windows Home Server and open source Linux operating systems.

The processors include higher CPU frequencies for faster storage processing and will support next-generation memory technology DDR3 SODIMM. The DDR3 SODIMM dual in-line memory modules offer double the I/O data rates of today's SDRAM.

In March, Intel announced a new Atom processor platform that was optimized for use in network attached storage (NAS) devices for home and small businesses.

The 1.66GHz Atom D410 single core and D510 dual core processors were bundled with the company's 82801IR controller to create a hardware platform optimized for processing higher-intensity I/O workloads through hyper-threading, or parallelization of computations, and optimized data handling firmware.

That processing platform increased performance for popular consumer applications such as video processing by as much as 85%.

The new hardware platform supports 6 PCI Express lanes, 12 USB ports, and 2 eSATA ports.

Equipment manufacturers such as Acer, Cisco, LaCie, LG Electronics, NETGEAR, QNAP, Super Micro, Synology and Thecus have all announced plans to offer products based on the new Atom processor platform, Intel said. Storage vendor products featuring the Intel Atom processor-based platform are currently available and additional devices will be released later this year, it added.

LaCie recently introduced two storage servers using Intel's Atom processor technology to "deliver enterprise-level storage capabilities to small and medium businesses that were previously only experienced in large, corporate environments," said Erwan Girard, solutions business unit manager.

Dinesh Rao, product line manager for Intel's Storage Group, said the new Atom processor "makes it possible for storage vendors to develop low-power appliances that can innocuously sit on a desk or shelf while keeping digital content safe and available anytime, anywhere."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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