On Monday, SeaMicro declared that it has built a server, which comprises 512 low-power Intel Atom processors on small motherboards, the size of credit cards.

Atom processors are usually used in netbooks, but Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro's CEO, says that they can be much more power-efficient compared to x86 chips for certain cloud and Web transaction workloads. Such operations are likely to be minor in size but greater in volume.

Feldman said that today's servers are incompetent on tiny workloads.

He said that higher-performance chips such as Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron are competent at operating conventional project workloads like database applications.

But he deems a set of small Atom cores offers improved performance-per-watt in the cloud.

Feldman said, "Atom turns out to be good at ordinary problems and not great at hard problems. The Internet is all about ordinary problems".

Other sellers have also been shifting to substitute, low-power chips in servers. Dell has created servers using Via Technology's Nano processor for a few of its cloud clients, and Microsoft's research group has made some tentative Atom-based servers.

SeaMicro devised its new server, dubbed the SM10000, with as little components as feasible to save space and decrease power ingestion.