This was posted yesterday, but I feel it got lost and deserves some discussion. Of the architectures presented, the Cavium Thunder looks the most promising. I don't think Intel can be beaten on average. If somehow, you manage to tune the architecture so that Xen runs well and the networking is flexible enough to support nice multiplexing into virtualized domains, we could see really good uptake into cloud providers. Something akin to Intel's "secure enclave" technology would be the icing, assuming they can get it to market before Intel.