By Michael J. Miller, ExtremeTech
To some extent, the mainstream server market seems pretty clear. Today, the bulk of servers used by business are two-processor boxes, with each processor running four to eight cores. These are typically designs from Intel or AMD that feature the x86 processor instructions, and a lot of cache. Listening to both Intel and AMD recently, you would think that the future of servers is going to be more of the same—with a lot more cores.

But beneath the surface, there seems to be lots of variations, alternatives, and some completely new ideas. These ideas range from running many, many cores in a single processor to splitting up workloads among many more servers, each running much lighter processors (Intel’s own Atom processor and variants of the ARM architecture popular in phones and other consumer devices).

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