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.