Intel Stepping upto the Low Power CPU Market

Looks like Intel wants to step upto the low power CPU market with it’s Diamondville platform.

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This is a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. To much recently have CPU companies been looking to power the chips upto max speeds but have been increasing the power consumption of them. True, I have a quad core machine but I use it for very computational heavy work and I can see this is of great benefit.

However I also have a web server (the one this site is on) and that doesn’t need to be as high power. Low power components make this machine up. And it’s only 533Mhz but it’s an old chip and it’s power efficiency is a bit bad (from a previous post, you can see my laptop at idle draws less power than this rig) so news of a new Intel platform is exciting news to me.

It sounds like I can upgrade my server to a faster chip (and if I wait, a dual core one at that) and still keep the low power envelope. It would benefit me, the environment and best of all, it’ll mean I have a speed boost to the server.

It’s something I’ll be keeping a closer eye on.

Hopefully in the near future, I’ll be able to compare a RAID array NAS deivce to my server and decide for a future purchase whether a dedicated fileserver/webserver is a better purchase than a NAS device. Chances are both will be low power but do I take the extra features of the PC over the NAS device? Most NAS devices these days are very good when it comes to features and come with a low power draw. Something to keep an eye out for.