Over the past couple of years, some startups have been using mobile chips as a way to bring high performance computing to the data center in the form of low-power, space-saving servers.

On Friday, August 19, one of those startups, SeaMicro, will be discussing the tech behind its Intel Atom-powered SM10000-64HD server (pictured above) during the company’s presentation, “Building Data Center Servers Using Cell Phone Chips,” at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. I could get picky and mention that Atom-powered devices are what you could generously call “few and far between in the cell phone/smartphone market” — ARM rules this space — but, well, I kinda just did…

In any case, the SM10000-64HD’s tech is worth discussing, considering that it produces the computational output of a traditional rack of servers using just one fourth of the power in one sixth of the space, according to the company. Using this “rack in a box” architecture, SeaMicro packs 384 Intel Atom N570 dual-core processors rated at 1.66 GHz into an x86-friendly system ($237,000 base price) that the company hopes will entice data center operators and cloud providers.

Why should they care? Because they’ll soon be facing dwindling floor space, exploding energy costs and environmental scrutiny, if they aren’t already. SeaMicro’s founder and CTO, Gary Lauterbach, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, hopes those factors — not to mention his company’s tech — resonate with the crowd at Hot Chips.

He states, “As data centers become more and more essential in day-to-day life, power consumption and space requirements are issues with real economic and environmental consequences. We are excited to share our unique approach to the problems faced by the data center at Hot Chips, in order to spark further discussion and innovation.”

Let’s hope.

Image credit: SeaMicro