I'm not really sure what real need they're trying to fill here. A single Atom core has a TDP of around 4W, performance-wise it's at about 10% of a mid range Core2 Duo, which has a TDP of around 65W, although the mobile versions are much more efficient than that (35W or so). To get 10 Atoms (or 5 if they're N300 series dual-cores) running must take much more infrastructure than a single Core2, which consumes power as well, so I doubt they're getting more FLOPS/Watt or integer ops/Watt than a Xeon or Opteron cluster.<p>So the intention must be maximising I/O. What sort of workloads are so shared-nothing that they can parallelise to this many non-shared-memory CPUs efficiently? Content Delivery Networks? Seems incredibly niche; niche enough that the CDNs probably have already built their own.<p>And what exactly is the I/O bottleneck on a Xeon system that a bunch of Atom systems can do better? FSB/Memory throughput maybe? The Nehalems already have a 192-bit, 1333MHz DDR3 memory interface per CPU and gigantic caches, along with I/O that doesn't share data paths with memory accesses.
I'm having trouble understanding what the market for this is. It's not going to win on instructions-per-die-area-per-second (NVIDIA and ATI are already ahead of this mark now, with hardware rather cheaper than $100k). And with 512 distinct CPU packages, there's no way the interconnect is going to be faster than the high speed serial stuff we're already using for stuff like SATA, 10G ethernet, Infiniband, etc...<p>So it's basically a physically smaller supercomputer running low-power CPUs. It probably wins on real estate and power metrics, and probably loses on cost vs. racks of consumer stuff. Is there a market for that? Note that the investment came not from a VC fund, but from the DoE...