drag2share: This 17-Year-Old Dropped Out Of High School For Peter Thiel And Built A Game-Changing New Kind Of Computer
On Tuesday, 17-year-old Thomas Sohmers unveiled a new super fast computer server that uses a fraction of the electricity that a normal computer does.
He's showing it off at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit happening this week in San Francisco.
OCP is the Facebook-led project that is changing the data center hardware industry. It's where big Internet companies like Facebook design their own hardware to be faster and cheaper than traditional options from companies like Dell, HP, IBM, or Cisco. (But Dell and HP are also involved in OCP). It gives those designs away for free, a concept called open source hardware.
This computer is the first product from Sohmers' startup, REX Computing, created with 52-year-old co-founder and CTO Kurt Keville.
The computer is a very powerful machine built with ARM processors, the kind low-power processors that run smartphones and tablets. (In geek speak: these are multi-core ARM processors designed for servers, made by a San Jose company called Xilinx.)
These servers allow more computing power to be packed into a smaller space. The server is "2,500% more power-efficient for the same performance," Sohmers told Business Insider. Think of it like a supercomputer running on the equivalent of smartphone battery.
And that has big implication! s for building green-but-powerful data centers.
"I think of myself as an entrepreneur besides just being an electrical engineer. I believe what I'm doing can have a major effective on the world," Sohmers said.
Low-power ARM servers is big trend in the server industry with companies like HP and Dell now in the market, but one that hasn't really taken off yet for a bunch of technical reasons that add up to one thing: there isn't a lot of software that runs on them, yet.
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