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Grumble, Intel Atom 330 is close, but not quite there

I have been quietly searching for a low power, quiet, affordable dual core x86-64 processor/motherboard combination that supports Virtualization Technology so I can load Xen and Linux instances for some home servers. Intel’s new Atom 330 comes very, very close; but lacks the Virtualization support and only comes with the hot and power-hungry 945GC graphics chipset. Integrated graphics is not a problem for me, as I am planning to make this a mostly headless server, but we could go much smaller and lighter than the 945GC.

Fudge, more waiting for the perfect solution…. So close, yet so far…

Update: So it turns out that if I have no need for Windows or any other operating system that is not aware of virtualization, the Atom 330 will work fine for Xen and Linux! Woo hoo! Now I have the difficult decision of do I wait for a board with no graphics or more efficient graphics, or do I go ahead and grab one of the cheap motherboard/processor combination boards now?

Happy Dance!

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