Quanta QCT, US subsidiary of the Taiwanese IT-gear manufacturing giant Quanta, expects to launch a microserver based on Intel’s Atom processor (cone-named “Centerton”) by the end of 2012.

Microservers built around low-power “wimpy-core” processors are usually packed in large numbers into chassis and deployed together to support homogeneous applications typically delivered over the Internet. These are applications like dedicated web hosting or cloud-based services, for example.

The appeal of using wimpy-core processors in such data center architectures is their low power consumption and design simplicity, which makes them cheaper to both buy and operate.

Mike Yang, general manager and VP of Quanta QCT, said data center customers demanded the most efficient hardware available, as power costs, cooling loads and space restrictions in their mission-critical facilities rise.

“They ask us for the greatest efficiency possible in a vanity-free hardware configuration that maintains 100 percent compatibility with the x86 software ecosystem,” Yang said. “Our integrated engineering, design and manufacturing capability allows us to be among the first manufacturers to provide this solution, leveraging our longstanding partnership with Intel.”

Quanta’s upcoming microserver is called Stratos S900-X31A. It comes with either 24 or 48 nodes in a 3U chassis. Each node consumes less than 10 watts, according to Quanta.

 This is going to be the second microserver from the San Jose, California-based firm. The previous model, Stratos S910-X31B, was released in June and featured nine or 12 nodes in a 3U chassis.

The first microserver was based on Intel’s Xeon E3-1200/E3-1200 v2 processors.