SeaMicro, the ambitious start-up that has been building so-called microservers out of low-power Intel Atom chips, has started building microservers out of low-voltage quad-core Intel Xeon chips using the same architecture its Atom systems use.

The development is called the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. Needless to say, it's the first fabric-based Xeon microserver ever made.

It's also supposed to be the most energy-efficient, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Xeon server now available, period.

A single SM10000-XE replaces 32 dual-socket servers, but draws half the power and takes up a third the space without any changes to operating systems, applications or management tools.

It eliminates layers of Ethernet switches, server management devices and expensive load balancers.

Because it's Xeon-based it can run heavyweight scale out workloads while the Atom-based SM10000-HD is meant for the highly parallel workloads found in the web tier. That means that microservers can capture a bigger piece of the data center. SeaMicro says the microserver will go mainstream running Apache Hadoop, real-time analytics, Java apps, PHP, Memcached and NoSQL.

The widget is built around the Xeon E3-1260L based on Sandy Bridge architecture and Samsung's new low-power 1.35V Green DDR3 DRAM memory. Since its breakthrough, Intel and Samsung were both at its launch Tuesday when SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman announced it was shipping in volume.

Microservers are all about density, space and power. The Xeon E3-1260L has a 45W TDP envelope, providing 30% better performance per watt than processors from Intel's previous generation, and SeaMicro has invented a new technology called TIO, short for Turn It Off, that lets it power-optimize the parts by turning off unnecessary CPU and chipset functions.

The chip's four cores run at 2.4GHz CPU core. The clock can be throttled to 3.3GHz with Intel's Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and it'll support eight threads with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.

The SM10000-XE contains 64 CPUs for 256 2.4GHz cores in a 10U or 1,024 cores in a standard rack. It delivers 10 gigabits of bandwidth to each quad-core processor, which SeaMicro says sets a high watermark for bandwidth per unit compute.

It supports up to 32GB of DRAM per socket for a system total of 2.04TB.

The processors are tied together by SeaMicro's Freedom Supercompute Fabric, which delivers 12 times the bandwidth per unit compute of a traditional server.

The XE also supports up to 16 10-gigabit Ethernet uplinks or 64 one-gigE uplinks. And unlike other microservers, it can support up to 64 SATA hard disks or solid-state disks without reducing computational density.

SeaMicro's boards are Spartan in their minimalism consisting of only the processor, Samsung's DDR3 and SeaMicro's new Fabric ASIC, reportedly the industry's first second-generation fabric ASIC, capable of supporting both large cores like the Xeon's and small cores like the Atom's.

SeaMicro figures eventually it'll be able to design systems using Atoms and Xeons together in the same enclosure.

The XE's austerity derives from SeaMicro's Input/Output Virtualization Technology which reduces the component count, shrinks the motherboard and reduces power, cost and space.

The Freedom Supercompute Fabric is built of multiple Freedom ASICs working together, creating a 1.28 terabits a-second fabric that ties together 64 of the power-optimized mini-motherboards at low latency.

Samsung's small high-density 30nm Green DDR3 is supposed to achieve more than a 70% power savings over 1Gb 1.5V 50nm class DDR3, improving SeaMicro's TCO.

The SM10000-XE lists for $138,000 for a base configuration.

CompSec, which works with the US intelligence community, has adopted the widgetry in mission-critical applications to deliver huge amounts of compute power to remote and hard-to-access locations. It says it "greatly reduces response times, provides faster and more in-depth analysis, and helps to advance their mission."

Mozilla is also on board. Matthew Zeier, director of IT infrastructure and operations, says that between the Atom boxes and the Xeon boxes "SeaMicro is able to meet the computational needs of our entire data center while driving down operating expenses by saving us power and space. We are a very happy customer."

Intel has previously acknowledged that microservers could represent 10% of the server market by 2016. Its data center unit general manager Jason Waxman explained Tuesday that that forecast included both Atom and Xeon widgetry. Intel may be somewhat conservative considering the Xeon chip SeaMicro is using costs less than $300.

SeaMicro expects the next Atom generation to move chipset functions into the SoC, which will save more power and give it more real estate for processors.

SeaMicro rival Calxeda is building ARM chips into microservers.