Experience with low-power x86 processors (Atom) for HEP usage. An initial analysis of the Intel® dual core Atom™ N330 processor

In this paper we compare a system based on an Intel Atom N330 low-power processor to a modern Intel Xeon® dual-socket server using CERN IT’s standard criteria for comparing price-performance and performance per watt. The Xeon server corresponds to what is typically acquired as servers in the LHC Computing Grid. The comparisons used public pricing information from November 2008. After the introduction in section 1, section 2 describes the hardware and software setup. In section 3 we describe the power measurements we did and in section 4 we discuss the throughput performance results. In section 5 we summarize our initial conclusions. We then go on to describe our long term vision and possible future scenarios for using such low-power processors, and finally we list interesting development directions.